THEODORE ADORNO

Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a 'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic.
Adorno saw that capitalism had not become more precarious or close to collapse, as Marx had predicted. Instead, it had seemingly become more entrenched. Where Marx had focussed on economics, Adorno placed emphasis on the role of culture in securing the status quo.
Popular culture was identified as the reason for people's passive satisfaction and lack of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system.
Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.
False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.
Commodity fetishism (promoted by the marketing, advertising and media industries) means that social relations and cultural experiences are objectified in terms of money. We are delighted by something because of how much it cost.
Popular media and music products are characterised by standardisation (they are basically formulaic and similar) and pseudo-individualisation (incidental differences make them seem distinctive, but they're not).
Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.
Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that television leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again.

• Adorno, Theodor W. (1991), The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, Routledge, London.

This article is written by David Gauntlett on his website here here 

It might be argued that the standardization of the cultural product under late capitalism is technologically determined, the same as an industrial product such as a can of green beans. Horkheimer and Adorno begin by considering, and dismissing, the claim that the standardization, the identity of mass culture, can be explained in technological terms. Technology attains its power, they argue, only through the power of monopolies and great corporations.The most powerful industries, viz. banks, chemicals, electricity, petroleum, steel, control the culture monopolies, which are "weak and dependent in comparison."/10/ The latter produce and market the mass culture.
Mass society has two aspects, mass production and mass consumption. Adorno stresses that the standardization of the cultural product is not a consequence of mass production. He states that "the expression 'industry' [in the concept 'culture industry'] is not to be taken literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself -- such as the Western, familiar to every movie-goer -- and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process."Earlier, he had been even more specific. "The production of popular music can be called 'industrial' only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage." It is "still 'individualistic' in its social mode of production."Rather, standardization is a necessity of mass consumption. "Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener's attention ... by deviating in some way from the established 'natural' [music]... The other is for material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call 'natural' music ... that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against such deviations."
Adorno continues that "the paradox in the desiderata -- stimulatory and natural -- accounts for the dual character of standardization itself. Stylization of the ever identical framework is only one aspect of standardization." "The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization [i.e.] endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself." Pseudo-individualization, for its part, prevents the listener from resisting the standardization which is reducing him to the animalistic level by making him forget that the music was standardized.
This dual characteristic of popular music also proves to be significant for purposes of marketing it. In order to be mass marketed, "a song-hit must have at least one feature by which it can be distinguished from any other, and yet possess the complete conventionality and triviality of all others." Without pseudo-individualization, what the marketing industry calls "product differentiation," the song could not be successfully marketed. Without standardisation, it could not be "sold automatically, without requiring any effort on the part of the customer;" it could not be mass-marketed at all.