So the record industry has been "dying" for a long time. Napster was going to do it, but didn't, thanks to Metallica's selfless(?) efforts. Mp3 players were going to do it, sending us back to an era of singles, but again, artists still made long-playing albums and people still buy them. But an often overlooked contributor to declining record sales is the so-called (by nerds) "loudness wars", which through the history of recorded music have pushed subsequent recordings to literally be louder than everything before it, pissing off these audio and music nerds and subconsciously annoying the general public. This has been happening for decades, but we are reaching a real, tangible threshold, and you almost can't blame people for not buying albums, because they are fulfilling hater's prophecies by becoming ACTUALLY unlistenable. And you know what? It's our own damn fault, because we're all asking for it. It's the equivalent of painting the Mona Lisa fluorescent yellow, and saying "It's better because you can see it better now", and we're all saying it's okay.
To understand all this you have to understand a couple of rudimentary characteristics of sound. This is about as nerdy as I get so bear with me. Anything that holds recorded music, whether it's a digital file or physical media like tape or vinyl, has a limited capacity, a volume level it can't exceed. On a record, this is the width of the groove. Digitally it gets stranger, but there is still a real limit to how much sound it can process. When something hits or tries to pass this limit, the audio signal peaks (that's a vocabulary word). Peaking is the sound of your signal breaking up, and by and large it's a bad thing. You are hearing the loudest part of a signal exceed it's threshold, break up, and distort. There are actually tasteful, SUBTLE uses of this in the analog world. Driving your tubes or hitting your tape a little hard can yield pleasing results, and it's widely agreed that some analog distortion can be a good thing. If you have audio nerd friends, impress them today by commenting on music with words like 'warm' or 'crunchy'. Say 'tape compression' or 'you're so lucky to have this on vinyl' and watch them droolingly ingratiate themselves to you with totally rare Shellac demo tapes. ANYWAY, these exceptions are applied during recording, not in the final stages of pressing an album. In vinyl you can't exceed your limit because it won't physically work; the needle will skip. In the digital world, your sound will crackle and break up, called clipping, above the limit: 0 decibels RMS (which is defined as blah blah blah).
Now that you have a head full of jargon, I can really start ranting. Since the dawn of recorded music, people have been figuring out tricks to make their songs louder, for many reasons. One of the big ones is that when given the same audio played at two different volumes, your brain will usually tell you that the louder one sounds better. From this fact, it's not a stretch for a record company A&R guy to push for his record to be mastered louder than average, and if the engineer has the capability to do this then why not? If the radio DJ likes your loud song better, he'll give it more airtime, leading to more sales. This used to not be a big issue, but problems are arising as "louder" turns into "too loud". Average sound levels of records when I was born were often as low as -18 dB RMS. Some records today are put out at close to -4 dB on average. Decibels work on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one, so this is much louder. These are average levels: records in the 80's got loud too, but they also got quiet, and that's important. Dynamically compressing audio doesn't just make everything louder, it also makes that loudness consistent, trading away dynamic changes for the sake of being louder than the song on the radio before you. When recordings aren't allowed this natural breathing and every note and drum hit is the same volume, your music is left with all the nuance of an air horn, and it fatigues your ears in a real way. Your ears are not built for sustained listening at a constant volume, and whether you like it or not they will get tired of it.
So how sinister does that sound? Even songs you enjoy by artists you like, you can't listen to over long periods of time, because your ears get tired of the constant beating they take. But why do people keep pushing these limits, even as we sacrifice physical comfort for loudness-over-all? Part of the blame rests on the aforementioned A&R folks. Radio disc jockeys are also a culprit. A fair amount of blame rests on modernity in general. Music is everywhere, but I'll wager that recreational music listening is waning. It's become a must for music to be playing in grocery stores, cars, and really anywhere that it's possible, and this heavily compressed (but noisy and irritating) music cuts through the noise of traffic, and sounds louder through the less-than-great speakers in most of these places, not to mention crappy computer speakers and tiny earbuds. Again, this is all at the cost of listenability, and to me that isn't worth it. Naysayers please refer back to my Mona Lisa analogy.
The good news is that people are becoming more aware of this. I am not the first person to write about it by a long shot , and artists from Los Lonely Boys to Bob Dylan have spoken out against it. The bad news is that it's still happening. When I first heard about the scourge of overcompression, the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication was the album everyone name-checked for being needlessly loud. Recent years have brought us Metallica's Death Magnetic, an album that literally sounds better on Guitar Hero than on cd. Produced by name-among-names Rick Rubin, Metallica's ninth studio release clips all over the place. It's also a double-platinum album, produced by people whose careers are all decades long. Given that, we can assume this was intentional. Metallica and Rick Rubin, to some degree of cooperation, decided to make an entire album that above all else is just loud, and putting aside arguments about how good or bad their songs are, these guys made an album with the sonic variety of a chainsaw, on purpose. Artistic statement or not, it's a sign of the times, and it's kind of annoying. A petition was started, lobbying to get the album remastered and rereleased, and at last count there were 21,000 signatures on it.
