Comment by rdiddly
3 hours ago
It's cheaper to do what? The thing they're getting for less money is precisely the improved quality or listenability. Their definitions of quality and good enough might be fucked up, but the intent and purpose is clearly to improve it up to some minimal level of quality, otherwise how are they judging a mediocre vs. great singer? How do they know when the great singer is done singing (sang a good enough take), or when they've tweaked the mediocre vocal track enough? The technological interventions change the ratio of cost vs. quality, they don't make quality irrelevant. If they did, you could just record the crappy singer as-is and save even more money.
This post's point is that musical "quality" is not a unidimensional feature and that mechanically optimizing for these "quality" metrics can kill something interesting in music.
Yes I get it, and I'm not replying to the post. I'm replying to the comment that said it was all about saving money and "has nothing to do with it being more listenable." Clearly that can't be true; these producers are trying for some standard of listenability (which I already said could be wrongheaded, to your point). If they weren't, they would not only save money by hiring mediocre talent, they would also save even more money by not doing any post-production interventions at all.