254 Part III: Emigration Years
he brought together the results of the study in which he had invest-
igated the claims of the radio organizations to bring classical music to
their listeners. Symphonic music on the radio was questionable, he wrote,
because it delivered only a poor impression of a live performance.^62
‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’, the talk given to his fellow members
of the radio project, presented in abbreviated form the sum of Adorno’s
general theoretical views on the transmission of music by the mass
media that he described at length in the memorandum.^63 His study
‘On Popular Music’ appeared in 1941 in the last number of the Studies
in Philosophy and Social Science, which also published other con-
tributions that were thematically related to the Princeton project and
to media research. This was an essay he had written with George
Simpson. In it he tried to show that each new hit always contained
a new element, but at the same time it adapted itself to pre-existing
listening habits so as to be able to repeat the success of earlier hits.
The ‘Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour’ remained
unpublished. In this study he had investigated a series for children
and young people which had attempted to introduce them to serious
music. He concluded that, although the series was widely admired
in America, its design achieved the opposite of what was intended,
and that in reality it promoted the commodity nature of the music and
the consumer habits of the listeners, instead of guiding them towards
informed listening.^64
Looking back at his work on the project, Adorno acknowledged that
these four essays were no substitute for the social theory of radio he
had aspired to. He had been forced to restrict himself to these ‘models’
because ‘I did not succeed in making the transition to listener research.
That transition would be absolutely vital, above all else in order to
differentiate and correct the theorems. It is an open question, which in
fact can only be answered empirically, whether, to what extent, and
in what dimensions the societal implications disclosed in musical con-
tent analysis are also understood by the listeners and how they react
to them. It would be naive simply to presume an equivalence between
the societal implications of the stimuli and the responses, though no
less naive to regard the two as independent of each other in the absence
of established research on the reactions.’^65 By the end of his work
on radio, Adorno had developed one fundamental conviction about
the media, namely the premise, never subsequently abandoned, that
the stereotypical production mechanisms of popular culture can be
related back to the expectations of consumers. He became convinced
that, in the ‘organized’ societies of an ‘administered world’, people’s
communicative needs deviate less and less from one another. This
explains why conscious manipulation by radio and the press is basically
superfluous. There is a ‘pre-established harmony’ that ensures that
media audiences demand the very fare that the newspapers, the radio
and film serve up.