It’s not even remotely the same thing. All those guys still have to go out and play live or they would have had no career. If you were a rock or metal band back then and didn’t tour, you wouldn’t make it past one album. Or even maybe get to the first one. A label wouldn’t have signed a rock band they didn’t think could tour. They were signing almost all of those bands out of the clubs
Warrant guys had to woodshed and practice to get as close or even the same live to what the session guys did and any band that had session players still needed to play it live with the original members. Plus it was the producer making that call, not them.
Often a session player was used purely because time in the studio was big money and either somebody was too busy or strung out with their drug/alcohol habit or couldn’t get it together in the time they had….not because they’re outright wanted to fake themselves. The session player often mimicking the member’s style, knowing they’ll play it themselves later. One of the more well known examples being Kiss. But nobody doubted Ace and Peter’s ability to do on stage what was on the record (if they weren’t too fucked up at the time anyway
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A lot of those guys in the 80’s were still releasing Hot Licks and REH vids which were them 100%.
Cinderella used a session drummer but toured with the member. Nobody in the audience would have been able to tell..but for the record they wanted that perfection and he was delivering 85-90%.
This is nothing compared to people today outright defrauding and lying about what they can do to generate income and notoriety and getting to skate on performing it live. The only direct tie in to something similar I can think of is Milli Vanilli where they sang to tracks live because they had never recorded the vocals themselves.
For modern folks, there’s a big difference between editing takes together (comping) that you actually played and miming over a track or recording it at half to 3/4 tempo and speeding it back up. Also a big difference between having written something or crediting another player vs. outright theft of what you’re doing and calling it yours.
Spotify is full of channels where they steal smaller artists songs/recordings and make their own channel saying it’s them and get 1000’s of streams. Often more than the real artist. Ola even showed his original songs being used in this way. There’s also a lot of AI based channels that aggregate material from others to play as their own and it’s not even a person, just an AI front for a scumbag.
