You were the hottest rehashed new trend in music, and in 2005, T-Pain made every dead funk artist roll over in his grave with your use. Auto-tune, most people have no clue how you work, or where you came from, or even what '808's & Heartbreaks' was, but by the end of the Super Bowl, you were dead. By the time the Budweiser Corporation cashes in from the above commercial, no hip-hop artist will step within 10 feet of you. Okay, maybe T-Pain will fiddle with you some more, but he more or less made himself the spokesperson for hip-hop autotune (sad that we can call it a genre now). Regardless, autotune isn't the first hip-hop fad that went mainstream and then went south. You'll probably end up like phat, kickin, bling-bling, maxin, BALLIN!!, and every other piece of hip-hop lore that got popular: in a VH1 special 5 years later.
To be honest, Jay-Z loaded the gun, but Bud Light shot it through your digitally-enhanced sound. 'Death of Autotune' didn't kill you, though it sure signaled the end was near. As soon as Corporate America saw that a star as big as Jay-Z saying your name in a song, it was on like Donkey Kong. Even if he used you in a song and kept it in hip-hop rotation, they would have jumped on you. Autotune, that commercial might have been the end, yet you gave us some of the most memorable songs of the decade (kinda???). Instead of signaling your death with silence (sorry, Jay), I think it's best to remember the tracks that made auto-tune a trend in the first place...
PS: Ron Browz's career should be in the obituary, too...