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Artists Tinker With Auto-Tune In Concerts
A little pitchy-perfect // Illustration by Kate Walker
One of the dirtiest secrets in modern live touring is just how many artists are regularly using Auto-Tune tech to sound perfect during performances.
The High Note: Live music has become so expensive that expectations are now sky-high… which means artists feel pressure to sound perfect. That’s led many of them to seek solutions that can tweak their pitch in real time, fearing that a flub could disappoint fans and turn into online ridicule. It’s a practice that can strip authenticity from what should be the most real way to see an artist.
Behind The Songs: Maybe having the tools to be pitch-perfect is making it harder to have a genuinely authentic experience.
Catherine Provenzano, a professor of musicology at UCLA, told NYT that almost every modern high-profile live performance “has had somebody working live sound with Auto-Tune on it.”
Singer JoJo summed up why perfectly when she recently wrote on Instagram that “the standard for live singing isn’t human anymore.”
That’s even affected what shows artists are willing to do. Bobby Carter, the creative director for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, said that many artists have turned down performing because they can’t use Auto-Tune.
Encore: Ironically, more and more fans are realizing that their favorite artists are using Auto-Tune live… and they’re not too happy about it. Essentially, people want pitch to be perfect, but they want it done naturally. That expectation may already be pushing fans to embrace artists who are more raw and offbeat — people who feel human, warts and all.
Prediction: If fans are shying away from artists revealed to be using Auto-Tune, it feels like there may soon be a wholesale rejection of AI-generated music.
Together with Notion
Your Notion Workspace Is A Product — Start Treating It Like One
Early-stage teams move quickly, but their internal systems often struggle to keep up.
In the first few months of building a company, it’s easy for documentation, roadmaps, meeting notes, hiring plans, and customer insights to scatter across different tools and conversations.
At first, that mess feels manageable. But as the team grows, every unclear process becomes a drag on execution.
The most effective founders treat their workspace like a product — designing it intentionally with a clear structure, useful templates, shared naming conventions, and a simple onboarding experience for every new team member.
A strong workspace should make work easier to find, decisions easier to track, and priorities easier to understand.
Operational debt compounds just like technical debt. Every duplicate doc, lost decision, or unclear handoff slows the team down.
By building a clean, scalable workspace early, founders create a stronger foundation for faster execution, better collaboration, and less time wasted searching for context.
Build a workspace that scales with your team.
Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.