For decades, music got louder and flatter, and streaming may have called a truce.
From jukeboxes to CDs, record labels pushed tracks to sound louder than the competition. Digital compression let engineers squeeze out the quiet parts until songs became a wall of sound, sometimes audibly distorted. Critics called it the loudness war. Then streaming services started turning everything to the same volume.
Loudness has long sold records. In the 1940s jukebox owners set a fixed volume, so a single cut louder than the rest stood out. From the 1950s, producers asked for louder 7-inch singles to catch radio programmers' ears, and Motown's engineers were known for cutting some of the hottest records in the industry. Vinyl limited how far this could go: an over-hot master of Led Zeppelin II made some turntable cartridges jump, and the album was reissued.
The CD removed that physical limit but set a hard digital ceiling. To sound louder without exceeding it, engineers use dynamic range compression: the quiet parts are raised and the peaks held down until the whole track sits near the maximum. Through the 1980s, the average level of a rock song stayed around −16.8 decibels below full scale. After 1994, when the first mass-produced look-ahead digital limiter arrived, levels rose. Oasis's 1995 album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? averaged around −8 on many tracks, and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication in 1999 was criticised for audible clipping.
The backlash peaked with Metallica's Death Magnetic in 2008, whose CD was so compressed that it distorted. Fans hunted down the less-compressed versions made for the game Guitar Hero III. Bob Dylan complained that modern records had 'sound all over them' and no definition. Analyses in the early 2010s suggested loudness had peaked around 2005, and in 2014 Daft Punk's deliberately dynamic Random Access Memories won the Grammy for best engineered album.
The biggest change has been technical. By the early 2020s most major streaming services normalised volume by default, turning loud masters down to a common level, which removes the reward for squashing a track. Not everyone thinks the war is over: at least one critic argues that engineers still master aggressively, assuming listeners might switch normalisation off.
Source: Wikipedia — Loudness war · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
