Well you might have excluded tons of music without realizing. Studio albums are rarely live as you describe. Maybe the "scratch track" then it's off to the booth to redo vocals, overdub guitars, bass, etc.
Steak tartare, anyone?
Yes, tracks have been independently laid since multi-track recorders were first used. It was common in the 70's and probably earlier to lay a "backing track" to which other musicians would play when laying their tracks. Sometimes, the tape multitrack masters were transported to different studios for the other musicians.
But they didn't play to a computer-generated click track. They played to a backing track laid down by someone--the drummer plus someone that laid down chords. The backing track might not have even been used in the final mix.
Rick Wakeman tells a story of working with Ramon Remedios (opera singer) on several of his albums, and he provided a backing track for him to use. He often simplified the meter on the backing track so that Mr. Remedios could follow it more clealy--Wakeman said that the complex meters of prog rock were not always easy to follow for the singer.
He also tells the story of laying down the backing tracks on organ for three of the tunes on
Criminal Record, and then sending that to Chris Squire, Alan White, and Steve Howe to add their parts. He expressed disappointment that he was unable to re-record his own tracks after he heard what they had done. (In my opinion, he's wrong--that is for me his best solo instrumental album considering the range of sounds he captured.) That was in the middle 70's during his first hiatus from Yes, so loooong before digital click tracks.
Of course, even when those groups used those techniques to create recordings, they still performed those works live and had to bring the precision expected by the audience (which, of course, varied).
I've played to click tracks, and found it nearly impossible to follow changes in tempo without having to fully memorize it. I'm accustomed to conductors whose time is communicated visually (and continuously rather than in pulses), or to chamber groups who communicate musically to each other to build a consensus on tempo changes. Our large ensemble once performed
Rhapsody in Blue to a programmable grand piano that had been programmed with the player roll created by George Gershwin is own self, and the conductor was conducting to a click track in an earpiece. He is a top professional musician--retired from a long career in a premiere service band--and it just about drove him batty.
But what I hear in pop music seems to me more computer-generated than human. Partly that is an effect, and partly it is stuff they do to make people who are sufficiently pretty for music videos also be sufficiently in tune and in time for the recording. That's not all of it, of course, and that is also nothing particularly new. But I've never liked pop music of that type all that much, so I can't say that it's getting worse. I do miss the period of the 70's when groups were given the scope to experiment on recordings--they lacked that scope before that time and, it would seem, since. (I'm not talking about independently produced stuff that one never hears without being led to it--but that's a whole other topic.)
Rick "video killed the radio star" Denney