Session playing is one of the better career paths in music performance, such as it is, because it rewards being a highly-skilled technician. Producers can do ma

Session playing is one of the better career paths in music performance, such as it is, because it rewards being a highly-skilled technician. Producers can do marvelous things in a DAW, but it's all sampling. If they want a live part and they want to sound like it, bringing in a player for an hour can be more cost-effective. The problem is that you need superstar skills to pass the threshold of actually getting those gigs - you have to show up and just be able to nail things on the first take, and even improvise your part if asked. If you aren't fussy about sound quality, then it's not really important how the part is played, but that's also why music has such a crisis as an economic activity; sequenced and prerecorded substitutes for live performance aren't timbrally the same, but they let you communicate all the structural information of the music. In a sense, it's like we replaced listening with reading, and that's a problem when so much of music is relatively similar.