system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What do people mean when they say that a music album is 'overproduced'?

Some examples too would help.
gpt
Let's say you have three musicians. A singer, drummer, and guitarist. If they were to play some music live in front of you it would have a natural sound to it. What this means is:

* Large dynamic range: The volume of each instrument would vary. For example the volume of the drums differ by each hit since a human will never strike exactly the same.

* Pitch would vary too: All instruments are tuned, but it's never perfect simply because of the nature of them. They might get warm, humid, de-tune while playing etc. The musicians playing might make small mistakes here and there. The singer will of course not be pitch perfect at all times either.

* Timing: Ideally the drummer would keep a constant tempo and the other musicians would follow this exactly. But this is impossible to do in a live setting. There will always be some off-timing of everything here and there, even if it's just for some milliseconds.

All of these effects are subtle, but give rise to a "natural" sound. However when recording an album you are free to 1) do as many takes as you want to get that perfect crisp take, and 2) polish it in the mixing.

For example you can put autotune on everything, guaranteeing that nobody ever goes off-pitch at all. You can slide and adjust every take to have perfect timing with the drums, which themselves can be perfectly fit to one tempo through the song. And lastly you can apply compressors to everything. These make everything have the same volume (the loud parts get quieter, the quiet parts get louder). This completely destroys dynamic range.

All of these things are part of what makes something sound "overproduced" i.e. it's been "produced" beyond anything that might sound natural. It ends up sounding artificial because in many ways it is. In the end it's of course a matter of taste what you think sound better. Overproduced music tend to be more favourable with today's younger generation, while natural sounding music is more favourable to older generations. In the past the technology to overproduce this way simply didn't exist.