When Jay-Z resurrected his Blueprint series with Blueprint 3, he did it by putting one of the most prevalent trends in pop music on blast. The album's lead single, "D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)," was a shot across the bow to those artists who take the easy way out -- keeping their voice in key (kinda) with the help of Auto-Tune and generally, unabashedly, sounding like T-Pain. (Or Cher.)
When "D.O.A." dropped, radio DJs gabbed and bloggers blogged with breakneck pace about how the game would be changed. Auto-Tune boxes would be gathering dust in studio closets in no time.
Wrong. Auto-Tune weathered Jay-Z's storm (not an easy feat), and many of the year's biggest hits wound up containing the equally maligned and popular piece of trickery.
Check out Hov's anti-Auto-Tune salvo as well as some of the better (Mario's delicate "Break Up"), sillier (Ron Browz's "Pop Champagne") and more comical (Jamie Foxx's "Blame It") uses of the gimmick, below in MTV's Auto-Tune Ain't Dead Yet video playlist.