Rock music has become a widely, if not universally, accepted feature of the contemporary musical landscape. However, the cultural and economic issues that made Rock & Roll popular and controversial during the 1950s remain relevant in the music academy, where popular music classes, despite being viewed by some as a threat to aesthetic and social values, have become common and profitable curricular offerings.

While some welcome the opportunity to broaden the music curriculum, many see such classes as a necessary, revenue-producing evil, or at most an opportunity for cultural indoctrination of the masses.  This position derives largely from the work of Theodor Adorno, whose negative aesthetic and social valuation of popular music in the 1940s remains widely influential in the academy today. 

Uncritical acceptance of Adorno’s valuation obscures not only the musical diversity and revolutionary social significance of rock and other popular musics, but also imposes a polarized view of music as either a low culture, commercially-motivated commodity or a high culture, commerce-free art.  This dichotomy not only inhibits understanding of both high and popular music and musical practices, but also the cultural and economic continuum connecting them.

Cultural economist David Throsby posits that both culture and economics are equally and compatibly concerned with value.  By considering the strengths and limitations of Adorno’s valuation of popular music and Throsby’s theory of the economic valuation of culture, it becomes possible to see that the study both high and popular musics can be mutually informative and that economic and artistic value are not mutually exclusive.