For Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School who coined the term, "culture industry" was an oxymoron, intended to set up a critical contrast between the exploitative, repetitive mode of industrial mass production under capitalism and the associations of transformative power and aesthetico-moral transcendence that the concept of culture carried in the 1940s, when it still meant "high" culture.
1996, John Sinclair, “Culture and Trade: Some Theoretical and Practical Considerations”, in Emile G. McAnany, Kenton T. Wilkinson, editors, Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, University of Texas Press