I'm totally okay with it. Lipsynching and air guitar are common at all levels of musicianship. It would be cruel as a society, to be okay with an aging millionaire celebrity playing air-guitar in a superbowl halftime show, but not okay with struggling amateurs at the local level playing air-violin for pocket change.
Given that lipsynching and air-guitar exist, and are standard tools of professional entertainers, I think it is elitist to say, these technologies should be forbidden for local amateurs. I think music-making should be democratic, and the tools should be available to anyone who wants to make a joyful noise. (Even beginners, posers, scrubs, losers, nerds, and geeks.)
Basically, I think it's elitist to say only rich, successful people are allowed to play the Milli Vanilli game.
Dude....these aren't even amateurs. They are total imposters. Watch the video in post #4.
My granddaughter busks in Australia where it is pretty tightly controlled and licenses are required for the various locations and times. She had to win a competition to get the ability to busk at a well-known location 2-days a week, 4 hours a day, for three months. She did very well there. Of course, she provides all her own music playing guitar while she sings. She is only 16 now but has had to put in a lot of work to be able to qualify to get licenses to busk in various areas throughout New South Wales.
She has talent and she's been practicing daily since she was about 10 to get to a level where she could actually make some money busking. She also plays piano to accompany herself on stage for some songs, while playing guitar when she's busking. She exhibits real talent, drive, and works hard to be able to perform. When she was 11 years old she sang for the Kids Australian version of The Voice, Australia. Made it to the blind auditions but didn't get a chair turn although she got a lot of encouragement and recommendations from the judges on how to get to the next level. She won a competition in 2019 and the reward was a week in New York to see a couple of Broadway shows and talk to the performers.
To refer to lip-syncing and air guitar as musicianship is ludicrous. Sure it's fun if everybody knows what it is but there is nothing musical about it. It's all phony. And lip-snycers and air guitarist are not local amateurs because they are not musicians at all. Obviously you don't remember what happened to Milli-Vanilli in December of 1989 when Charles Shaw revealed that he was one of the three vocalists who actually sang on the album and that Milli Vanilli didn't sing on any of it. Their records sales not only ceased, but they had to return their 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist Award and three other awards from the American Music Awards. They never did sing on any album and the fact that they defrauded everyone was a huge black eye for the music recording industry. NOBODY should play the Milli Vanilla game. It's straight-up fraud and it ruined their lives.
Also, making-music has nothing to do with democracy. There's no majority rules on making music. It's personal effort to excel at music, be it performance or writing, and those who put in the work and effort to reach a level of success with it deserve everything they get. There are no guarantees. Networking is a huge part of it. Once a musician reaches a certain level of competency in his or her instrument, how much better he she is doesn't necessarily mean much, if anything. Once you are at that level, who you know, and being in the right place at the right time have more to do with getting a big break than anything else.
When I was a member of the Los Angeles Musicians Union (AFM local 47) there were people who spent all day every day at the union hall hoping someone would come in and need their instrument for a recording or gig. And it did happen once in a while. If a musician didn't show up for a session, the producer would send someone over to the Union Hall to hire a guitarist, or a bass player, or a keyboardist, or a trumpet player, or a violinist, etc. Hope you weren't in the restroom at the time. Problem was you literally needed to be there all day every day and you can't earn any money sitting in a union hall. You see how this is going? I've never seen so many starving musicians who had tremendous talent playing dives for almost nothing as I did during the 4 years I lived in LA. The best drummer I have ever seen, bar none, was playing a dive bar in Torrance, CA (south of LAX) for $25 a night.
