i wonder what the industry would be like sans auto tune...

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It's really actually hard to tell at this point where even some of the more talented, top of the line artists need their voices tweaked to be at top quality just for the sake of top quality and mainstream sparkle. I'm not neccessarily saying it's over the top, but these days can anybody tell that what i said about singers not even deserving of or needing auto tune get it anyhow?

In the 70's and early 80's you had to actually be talented enough to actually sing. The beginning of the quality slide was the advent of the Eventide H3000. --If you had $4000+ you could use it for pitch correction, or pay the studio engineer to do it. Nowadays AutoTune does the same thing for a lot less, and is everywhere.

That being said if there was neither of the above, talent would actually matter again, though in retrospect the H3000 did have some nice reverb and cool modulation effects.

No need to wonder, just go listen to music from the past. Especially from the 50s and before. Not even no autotune, a lot of that stuff is just one shot takes, no mixing of individual instruments into one song in the recording studio, no changing distortion, etc, just bam, sing it, done. You had to be super good then.

As far as actually needing it, well, you don't "need" a lot of things, some artists are probably good enough to do one shot takes even now, but as things get more advanced, a lot of what was a luxury before goes into people's realm of "need."

I wish autotune would disappear. Highly unlikely any time soon. Fortunately, I listen to artists who don't use it.

As for the music industry without autotune, I believe it would be better over all. Autotune was invented to find oil.

It'd be the same as it always has been. Autotune is annoying, but the music industry has never been "good" - there have always been good artists and there have always been bad artists and there has always been a large volume of mass-produced pap by people without much talent right back to the very first mass distribution of music.

What happens is that there is an (entirely understandable) bias towards playing the good music from an earlier era. If someone wants to play an old record, they'll play a good one. They won't dig out one of the crap ones. So when we hear music from an earlier time, we're used to hearing the good stuff, not the dross. As I said elsewhere, if you go back and look at the chart listings, it's often a very different story.