I agree completely. Somewhere, Adorno is smiling. No, wait, Adorno didn't smile. He'd be nodding his head in dour approval, though.

I was thinking about precisely this the other day. During the pandemic, I have had and nurtured bursts of enthusiasm for particular musical artists, and then I move on to the next. This week featured Frank Zappa. Now I know Zappa is not everyone's cup of tea -- e.g., he never comes up for air when he solos, even though he is vastly underrated as a guitarist -- but it is hard to deny that he was a talented musician and composer. He wrote complex works that hold your interest even as they challenged you. Zappa would sink into utter obscurity today. He wouldn't last a nanosecond. Algorithms designed to extract value would avoid him like kryptonite.

How did I come to notice Frank Zappa? Free-form FM radio, which is nonexistent today. Nonexistent because the idea of making money promoting an artiist in a slow and steady manner, reaping modest returns on the bet that the artist is musically good enough to take off, has given way to what Shoshana Zuboff called "surveillance capitalism". This is where you, the everyday artist, provide content to the likes of YouTube and Facebook FOR FREE, and, in return, they bombard you with algorithmically determined ads to get you to buy stuff they think you need but actually make you want stuff you don't. It is an intrinsically unjust business model -- payment for services rendered, anyone? -- but it squeezes out all other "culture industry" business models. In the 90s and 00s, I used to quip that the marketing tail is wagging the musical dog. It's not even THAT anymore. It is the absolute monarchy of big data and algorithms.

Frank Zappa once quipped, during a monologue in his "Be-bop Tango" (which actually WAS a be-bop tango if you can wrap your head around it) that "Jazz is not dead: it just smells funny." Culture isn't quite dead yet -- people still read books and listen to challenging music -- but it is getting quite stinky. ---LMN