Is the audience for popular music created by the music industry?

Fenster and Swiss state that ‘some critics have argued that the market for popular music recordings, and therefore the pop music audience itself, are essentially created by the music industry’. It can be seen that the music industry has a lot of control over how society can access music and having specific target audiences for different genres of music just shows how the music industry are essentially creating the audiences. To have any music be popular, initially you would need a target group to aim at so that the artists knows what type of music is accepted into society. According to Peterson, Berer, Rothenbuhler and Dimmick, ‘a concentration has resulted in a more homogenised product’ meaning that popular music has no real difference between different tracks, everything is simply the same. This is likely to happen because once the music industry know what track works, everyone else in the industry take advantage of this and create similar tracks knowing they will be successful and the audience passively accept it. Therefore the audience is more than likely to be created by the music industry initially if not now.