What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong.

Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.

Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.

I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.

Marketing has become so disconnected from reality that such things have been normalized and trivialized.

For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions.

AI just put all that on turbo mode.

A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".