Yeah, pretty much. A perfectly tuned sound is the style right now. Give it a few years and it won't be. People will get tired of it and latch on to something else, as always.
Are we speaking of "modern pop music" as something distinct from pop music of the past? It's really not.Pop music has always been made for the masses, and as such the most popular tools and techniques of the time are employed. Today, it's AutoTune. In the '90s, it was that grunge sound. In the '80s, it was synthesizers. In the '70s, it was a disco beat, etc. Same as it ever was.
That's true, but before modern technology they were forced to hire actual talented musicians. In the 1960s it was "Find some talented musicians, then find a way to market them to the masses". Now it's "Figure out what you want to market to the masses, then find some hot person to be made into it".
Auto-tuning isn't inherently a bad thing, just it tends to be used in bad ways.
Returning to another point, it's true that the record company signed a lot of the grunge bands because grunge was popular at the time. The difference is that most of the big grunge bands were playing in small clubs before they every got popular, a notable exception being Alice in Chains (And in the 60s the big exception would be the Monkees). How many of the current popular bands formed on their own and toured small clubs before being signed?
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