How about a situation where you're recording a song with your buds/bandmates and the drummer played a few notes out-of-time or singer didn't quite sing that long note in tune. You're not going to hire anybody to replace what they did. You can have your buds come back and try and try until they get something to your standard or tell them that they're bad musicians and need to study and practice for more years and years before they dare want to record a song again (purist). Or You can just live with the bad ("shitty is pretty"). Or you could hire someone to come in and replace their parts. Or you could just take a few minutes to fix it in cubase.

To me, the central question is: is this about the composition or the performance? Personally, I spent my university time getting a degree in music composition, so getting the point of the composition across is my priority. I'll auto-tune and quantize whatever if the composition comes across better. But I could understand if other people feel differently (they are a purist or very performance-oriented).

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.

> It’s cheaper to have some mediocre singer do the track and fix it later. You don’t have to pay the great singer. And if you do get a great singer, you don’t keep them in the studio for as long. It’s just a cost savings.

I think you're on to something, but it isn't quite what you think it is.

Corrections are largely a cost issue. But not because singers are so expensive.

The costs being saved are related to the rarity of finding someone who is a great singer at the same time that they're also a great dancer and stunningly attractive. It's much easier to find someone who's an outlier on one dimension than someone who's an outlier on two. If you want someone who is extreme on three dimensions (that you specify in advance), you probably won't be able to find that person at all.

Corrections in production mean that you can achieve something like this:

- Beauty: extreme natural talent, plus help from consultants, stylists, makeup artists, etc

- Dance: about what an average person can achieve through intensive training

- Vocals: extreme machine-supplied talent

at low cost. There are other possible approaches. You could look for a great singer who's willing to have tons of plastic surgery. You could look for a great dancer who's willing to have their singing and physical appearance 'corrected' for a trifecta. I don't actually think either of those would make for a cultural improvement - to the extent that we aren't already doing them - compared to what we have now.