With a few notable exceptions, today musicians need to be good looking in order to be marketable. It's much easier to take a beautiful or handsome model who doesn't have musical talent and use technology to manufacture a musician out of them, than it is to take a homely but talented musician and manufacture a star out of them.

And under 30.

I jest but let’s not say “musicians” need to be good looking but maybe in most cases “chart topping” musicians.

It’s always been a young persons game - at least as far back as the 80s

I’m lazy and didn’t feel like doing the work myself.

https://chatgpt.com/share/681bf3ea-c650-8010-988d-173af745c8...

But these results were based on using ChatGPT’s web search and Python tools and you can verify the citations and the Python code yourself.

Stats for the top 20 artists

Median age: 30 Mean: 30.55 Range: 22-29

I did the same analysis for 20 years ago for this week and the median and the range was 29.5 years old and the range was 18 to 35.

The top 10 20 years before that had a median of 26, a mean of 29.5 and a range between 21-37.

Those numbers aren’t quite as accurate because “We are the World” was #2 and you had a lot of groups back then

Also, they must work alone. It seems a music "artist" these days is only the face of the operation, the composers and stage musicians deserve no mention apparently.

You can thank T-Pain for it [1], but the hilarious thing is he can actually sing [2] unlike most of the others using it.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/06/t-pain-usher-ruined...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo

Almost every popular artist can sing far better than the average person. It's not a question of skill or talent, it's a question of perfect or imperfect.

The hype train does not allow for imperfection, nor does it stop for anything that isn't better than human.

AFAIK lots of new remasters of classic albums are auto-tuning the vocals as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/1bfxj2d/w...

I avoid the remasters.