To add to what Footer said, my own church band just recently started using
IEM's with a click and probably about 50% of the time a
track running concurrently. The click tightens up the less tempo-saavy musicians in the group and helps to keep everybody on the map. The tracks do expand the sound and enhance the overall musical aesthetic because there's just some things that can't be done live with 8 local musicians.
As a musician and a tech I see both sides of the argument. I personally don't enjoy playing with the click because I feel it takes away a lot of the energy that comes from a live performance, but I am used to using a metronome to practice with coming from a classically trained background. The click makes you listen to the click more than the other musicians and I think something is lost there. But there are definite advantages to using a click since you can then also sync with timecode and apply that to all sorts of crazy effects and gizmos.
As far as autotune goes, there are many flavors. I guess at this
point that a majority of albums feature at least some manner of
pitch correction since the music industry has been moving steadily in the past 50 years or so to a very heavily produced, image-conscious product-focused business. Less emphasis on artistic talent and technical ability than marketability. Which, it is what it is. I'm not saying today's music is crap, but the idea of what is "pop" has changed a lot since the Beatles.
I heard from a friend who worked with some guys who engineered albums for the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra (arguably one of the best orchestras in the US, if not the world) and they said their albums go through at least 500 edits and usually a lot more. So no genre is immune to the use of tech. It's in the studio, the album guys know how to use it and the good ones can use it to the
point you don't know it was ever used.
The fact is as recording technology has improved, so has the technology to enhance the actual quality of the music produced beyond what the performers abilities might actually be able to do and we now are at a
point where our ears as a group are tuned to hearing music a specific way. The perfection of these recordings can occasionally exceed what is physically limited by the performers. Now whether you consider that cheating or using the tools we have is up to debate.
Here's an example- the natural
horn was the predecessor to the French
horn. It had no valves and to
play in different keys, you'd actually have to remove certain pieces of pipe and replace them with pipes of differing lengths in order to put the
instrument in the correct key. Eventually, someone found that you could use valves to change the flow of the air through different length pipes to almost instantaneously change the key of the
instrument, thus allowing all the notes to be accessible without carrying around a few pounds of copper.
You could argue that the natural
horn player was more gifted since it was harder to do. But there are now pieces of music that are not possible to perform on natural
horn because of the lack of ability in changing keys quickly. The way I see it, technology in a rack is no different than putting valves on the
horn. The people that use it and use it well will always stand out as being innovative and unique and humans will create art with whatever they can find anyway. There will always be people who "cheat", to paraphrase Futurama, Hell is full of ten-year-olds who wanted to get really good without practicing.
(That's a little rhetorical -- The real answer is had I done it, I'd be the one singing soprano now, 'cause she'd have ripped my nuts off at the mere suggestion!)
