Certain media outlets and a few influential artists certainly bashed T-Pain’s robotic vocal style in “I’m Sprung when it was originally released in 2005, but the overwhelmingly positive reaction from fans trumped all of the surrounding negativity. Simply put, listeners loved T-Pain’s unique vocal style. The evidence of this reaction lies in the amount of streams and views the song has received on streaming platforms. The song was on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for twenty-six weeks and reached as high as the eighth most popular song in the United States in November of 2015.
This positive response to T-Pain’s unique aesthetic was one of the main reasons why the technology survived the initial backlash. The fans assured that the vocal style stayed relevant enough for famous artists such as Kanye West to commit to using Auto-Tune for the foreseeable future. After time went by and T-Pain continued to release songs that were met with overwhelming positivity, artists in the pop, R&B, and hip-hop spheres had no choice but to adapt Auto-Tune into their music in fear of losing their listener bases.
