ABSTRACT
The unprecedented growth of the culture industries over the last 100 years has been facilitated by increasingly sophisticated means of measuring and analyzing data about the industries’ customers and audiences. Such data allow the culture industries to imagine the people for whom culture is produced and to whom it is sold. The sheer size and geographic dispersal of these audiences has meant that by necessity measurements are conducted from a distance, through surveys, sampling, and demographic categorization. In this way the indeterminate behavior of individuals becomes regularized as the predictable responses of an aggregate audience.
