[...] ‘Once a formula was successful, the industry plugged the same thing over and over again. The result was to make music into a kind of social cement operating through distraction, displaced wish-fulfillment, and the intensification of passivity.’ In this, you might well think, Adorno was prescient: he recognised early the developments that would dominate television, film, commercial theatre, book publishing and the internet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how the endless repetition of successful formulas, such as in sequels or online retailer recommendations based on past consumption patterns, keeps us in a kind of Sisyphean hell, buying and consuming minimally different cultural products.