Hi Richard
You are opening to a big can of WORMS here IMHO. I have been into HiFi for many years, whatever HiFi means and that is quite debatable as well. But as many may be aware there has always been a long debate in HiFi circles of what is actually needed to reproduce what is recorded as made at the time of recording. In a way this is quite farcical because unless you are in the same environment (room, theatre, recording studio etc) you cannot hope to achieve a replica rendition, unless you emulate that in some fancy way. I highlight this because I think it has a relevance to what and how music is produced today, like it or not. what you hear is not necessarily how it sounded when recorded.
The issue is and has been that over at least the past 60 years the ability to control and modify how music is produced and recorded has grown exponentially. By that I mean the tools and capability to filter, add effects, modulate, re-tune notes/chords, overlay etc is so great that virtually anything in an engineers and producers mind can be done. Early examples would be Pink Floyds - ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ and The Beatles - ’ Sgt Peppers’ albums, along with a load of others, if you compare live performances of these to what was laid down in the studio then they sound quite different generally. Nowadays a computer can do whatever you want it to change how something sounds and is recorded, whether it originates from a real source instrument or real persons vocal.
a horrible example as we move forward in time is the horrific ‘Wall of Sound’ which became a thing in the late 90’s and 00’s. The music industry boosting low bass volumes to ridiculous levels, destroying dynamic range, all so that what a younger generation listening on in ear buds thought is sounded it had bass, the result being awful!
I agree with you a great deal of current modern music, pop and in some cases rock is so contrived and modified it probably bears little relationship to what the artist originally started out with. With the advent of AI unfortunately the can of musical WORMs just gets bigger sadly.
It’s the commerciality that matters to the Music Industry and what sells, not its content or how it was produced. This has probably always been the case but today we are beginning to see extremes of this.
I hope there is a backlash against this general trend and that ‘Real’ music produced by real musicians will be seen to be highly valuable and that authenticity and the ability to perform real live reproduction of what was recorded becomes important to maintain the integrity of it.