In “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1975) , Adorno declares: “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.”

This means that as consumers of cultural goods, we may think that we have choices or that we are the arbiters of the domain of consumption of culture, that we are being ‘served' by the culture industry. But according to Adorno, consumers are actually the objects or targets of culture industry rather than being agents and their welfare is not enhanced by the culture industry.

Adorno and Horkheimer belonged to the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory and were influenced by Marxism. They are not regarded as Marxists in the classical sense of the term but some key Marxist concepts such as ‘false consciousness', ‘reification', ‘commodity fetishism' and ‘hegemony' are significant for understanding their analyses of the culture industry.