In On Popular Music, Theodor Adorno, a social philosopher, strives to differentiate between "serious" music and "popular" music. "A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardisation".
Popular Music and Serious Music
He writes that popular music can be characterised by it's difference to serious music. This serious music is so because every piece of the music has a relation to the rest of it – every detail in the music comes as part of the whole of the work. In contrast, popular music always has the same structure to it, so no matter what different parts are added to it, it would still be the same song. He explains this further by adding that if one bit of a popular song was taken out and replaced with a different part of another popular song, for example the chorus, it would not be noticable, as it all sounds the same.
Adorno goes on to say that not only hits such as dance songs are standardised, but also those that are home songs, nonsense songs and laments, amongst others. Regardless of any changes that are made to the music, "the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced".
Psuedo-individualisation
He explains that even the little details added to songs to make them different are not original because there is already terminology for them such as "blue chords" and "dirty notes". Popular music "is composed in such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself". This, he explains, takes out any effort in listening to the music as it is already structured to be familiar.
This leads on to his explanation of how all popular music is the same, as listeners do not wish to waste time and energy listening and trying to understand, and so popular music is instead mass marketed as the producers know that this is what people like to listen to and will create commercial success.
This is kept hidden from listeners by "pseudo-individualisation", which means hiding that the music is mass produced as the listener does not really listen to the music themselves; the music "is already listened to for them". The consumer of the music would believe that they were listening to something new when really all the music is mass produced to the same standardised form.
An Alternative View
As an alternative view, Niall Mackinnon challenges Adorno’s theory in The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity. Adorno does not account for live performance, and Mackinnon writes that music gives a meaning that arises from our society. "The articulation of this meaning does not only reside in the production of certain sound structures but is produced in musical performance, itself a product of a constellation of behavioural acts, musical and non-musical".
Whereas Adorno writes that popular music bears no real meaning, Mackinnon explains that music really is meaningful to the listener, as they come to this understanding from "a whole series of preconceived notions that they bring to bear upon the musical setting". Listeners can find individual interpretations in songs due to their own personal circumstances.
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