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Firstly, the loudness war largely died with Spotify. LUFS normalization means that pushing beyond -14 is an artistic choice and not necessary to compete with other tracks on loudness alone.

Secondly, more compressed (less dynamic range) doesn't mean worse, or better. It means more compressed. In some genres, tons of compression is desirable; in others, less so. Is an orchestral Hans Zimmer piece that maxes at -10 momentary LUFS better than a Skrillex song that hits -4 during a drop? You could argue either song is better, but I don't think your argument would have anything to do with its LUFS measurement.

Compression is similar to distortion. Too much distortion is generally seen as bad. But if distortion were always bad, people would use acoustic guitars and clean electrics and never run things through a distortion pedal. Same idea with compression. Too much compression will kill a mix, but not enough will reduce the impact the song has on the listener.

In other words, trying to say that LUFS is an "objective metric of quality" is complete nonsense. To me that's like saying that lines of code written is an objective metric of quality of a software developer.

Agreed. LUFS as an "objective metric of quality" is nonsensical. I work as the assistant to a world class mastering engineer and we never discuss LUFS or aim to hit a target loudness. Such metrics (while well understood) are never a consideration.

All we do is listen. Often the goal is to get the record to feel as loud as it can be, but the moment our choices start to degrade the feel of the record we back off. We're doing very little in the way of actual limiting for loudness. We have ways of making the record feel louder, and they don't always involve dynamics processing.

Quite often no limiting is necessary because the mixes that we receive are mixed hot, which leads me to my next point:

Where I'll push back a little - for the sake of conversation - is the assertion that the loudness war died with streaming services. I consider their automatic level compensation features to be a big plus for audio fidelity. For artists and mixers who are sensitive to this issue it relieves them of the pressure of feeling that they need to deliver super hot mixes. The record can simply be what it needs to be and not conform to a certain loudness standard. It's a positive step.

Where my objection comes in is the reality that artists and mixers (who are well aware of the dilemma) nonetheless deliver us mixes that have been crafted for maximum perceived loudness. And they're really good at it. Even world class producers and mixers are sending us records that are squashed to hell, but very often they still sound good! The craft of mixing is evolving and people have become very adept at making an objectively loud record (-3 LUFS, etc) still work. HOW they do that is far too big of a topic to broach here.

Yeah it's true that people are still trying to make loud stuff. But as you say, people are so good at making it work now that's not really a "I'm making this -3 because I need to be competitive with other songs," it's "I'm making this -3 because it's a heavy bass record and I want this to melt people's goddamn faces when they listen to it." In other words, an artistic decision, rather than a business one.

I think most modern EDM-pop now is at about -7 or so. These are world-class engineers doing the mixing, they could absolutely push it to -5 or -3 if they wanted, there's just no need thanks to LUFS normalization.

Like when people think about the real victims of the loudness war, it's albums like Californication or What's the Story (Morning Glory), which really didn't need to be that loud except for sounding better (in the louder = better sense) on the radio. Something like Death Magnetic you could argue is both intentionally loud + a victim of the loudness war, but it's also just really poorly mixed/mastered in general.

Stadium Arcadium was a victim of this until the LP corrected the levels and is now considered the definitive version of the album.

I'm not sure if the high-res audio version on Apple Music has corrected this sin of the original CDs.

I generally agree, but I don't think your comparison between distortion and compression makes sense. Distortion (guitar pedals, etc.) is something the artist intentionally adds to the song, in a specific way, intensity, and time. Compression is something added after the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the listener."

> Compression is something added after the fact, for transit and storage. The artist doesn't really have control over what sort of artifacts lossy compression is going to add, so I don't see how "not enough [compression] will reduce the impact the song has on the listener."

This conversation isn't about file compression, it's about dynamic range compression. Very different.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-audio-compression.h...

I'm talking about dynamic range compression[0] in this context, not audio compression (e.g. MP3).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

There really aren't objective metrics. There are quantifiable metrics, but turning something into a number doesn't make it fully objective.

And nothing pushes for bland personalities near as much as people pining for the past.

That last statement might hold for "recent past" (last 10 or 15 years, say), but the one recent top 40 hit that stood out for me has a 50s type vibe (Until I Found You, Stephen Sanchez). I'm not particularly a fan of that style (well before my time!) but it's surely not "bland".

There are nuances there. I am not claiming that older things are bland. I'm saying that the people that are constantly pining on the past are. Really, it is more that they often make choices that lead to bland results.

Movies + Music aren't the same medium, though.

Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if anything it's easier than ever to get something out there on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public to consume media.

It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.

> Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs

It actually has. Venues are getting more and more expensive, and the effort to run shows has also increased - Rammstein is far from the only one requiring dozens of trucks to move their equipment around. On top of that you have Ticketmaster and their ilk on a brutal rent-seeking ride at the expense of both artists and fans.

> It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.

Yeah, indie stuff still works out fine these days, if not easier as Soundcloud has replaced physical tapes, but to achieve major recognition still takes an absurd amount of money, connections and luck. Or all three of them.

Venues and their increasing costs have nothing to do with production costs. Production costs refer to what it costs to actually produce a track and release it out there to the public.

Not even talking about insane amounts of good educational material available online for free these days, the capable equipment required to produce a studio-quality track fell down in price significantly, and most older equipment is still fully functional and compatible with newer offerings (thanks, MIDI and XLR). And newer equipment is still significantly cheaper than almost anything comparable from 20 years ago (if it was even available back then).

Back then, you wouldn't be able to produce anything that could compete in quality with studios from your bedroom, and not on a reasonable budget. And even if you somehow were so rich you were able to finance a pro studio in your house, and you produced a decent track, now the question is how would you even distribute it to the public and get heard.

These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.

> These days? Thanks to affordability of what it takes to produce a track and the ease of getting your material released to the public, you can go from a nobody to someone with a hit track overnight. All for the price of a laptop, some decent speakers/headphones, and a midi-controller. And even that list is optional, as there are people who produce great stuff with less than this or even something entirely different.

But how many actually manage to pull off that feat? You can probably count them on two hands. One-hit wonders yes, there have been a fair few of these that managed to hit the zeitgeist thanks to social media (Wellerman!), but a sustained career after that, from scratch and with no prior experience? I couldn't name one.

Everyone has the chance to strike a lottery jackpot, but only one person will.

> But how many actually manage to pull off that feat?

Quite a few, but that's not the point. Increasing opportunities for everyone does not mean that there will be the same levels of increase in top tier outlier outcomes. Just like if you suddenly gave access to MIT education to everyone, I think the success metric median (whether it is income or achievements) for MIT students will decrease, but the absolute number of successful people due to MIT education being available to everyone will increase.

Off the top of my head in terms of examples: Brockhampton, Skrillex, Billie Eilish, Porter Robinson, Steve Lacy (who produced hit tracks for artists like Mac Miller, J.Cole, and Kendrick Lamar), Flume, etc. The list can keep going on and on, and I listed only the very top tier artists in terms of popularity and lasting presence so far.

Skrillex, Billie Eilish and Soulja Boy immediately come to mind, and they're not even on the list of these artists on this ad-riddled collection compiled 3 years ago - https://www.technowize.com/12-musicians-who-were-discovered-...

Are they everywhere? Nah, music is a capitalist endeavor, and the market wouldn't support that. But there are a surprising number of artists that have gained success with their first endeavors produced out of their homes.

> Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs

“How much does it cost to make a hit song”

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-...

I too agree that music was ruined once loud orchestra's were formed. The only good music was chamber music. Orchestras anonymized the musician and were basically the end of musicianship.

I don't like the results of the loudness war either but it isn't objectively worse. Lots of people are listening to music on cheap speakers over the sound of road noise while driving or with generic earbuds on a train or any number of situations not conducive to high dynamic ranges. To these people in these situations, the highly compressed music sounds better.

Imo musicians need to make it a norm to release two 'correct' verions:

The highly compressed versions for radio play/commoners

And

A 'hi-fi' version for audiophiles

They need to be the same except for levels etc, and neither more official than the other

If your song can't be enjoyed in both ways, then either your music is 'specialty' music catering to audiophiles and musicophiles (?) Or it's just garbage and shouldn't be released regardless.

But that opinion may be a major cause for myself never releasing anything....

Why don’t we have an audio format that has different profiles with different mixes?

In a world of limitless storage that makes sense but for users who have music locally on thier phone not so much...

The actual use cases for each form undermine consolidation into one file.

It's hard to find a popular recording these days that hasn't had the vocal electronically altered. Autotune is just one of the effects applied.

>... popular recording...

At the risk of being reductive, dig a little bit deeper, beyond popular music, and you'll find large swathes of fantastic music where this isn't the case.

You're saying Daft Punk don't sing like that in real life?

>Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression...

Eeeeehhhhh. I've heard plenty of beautifully-mastered tracks that were otherwise just crap pieces of music, just as I've heard plenty of music that was so good I was willing to overlook the fact that it might be taking part in the loudness war.

Nothing about the "quality" of art, including music, is objective. These sound waves are better than those sound waves? No. Beauty and the quality of art is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

> One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range

The interesting thing about streaming services is they really put a cap on this (often a hard one measured by LUFS) and we really don't have as much wall-of-sound compression like we did from the 90s through the mid 00s.

https://hyperbits.com/ultimate-guide-to-the-loudness-war/

While the Loudness War is indeed a race to the bottom for the dynamic quality of audio, it would have occurred sooner if the medium for recorded music had allowed for it. Vinyl records simply cannot go as loud as today's modern records because of physical limitations in the medium.

Nevertheless, for 70+ years producers, record executives, and artists have been using every sonic trick at their disposal to make their record "pop" and stand out from the competition. The advent of digital audio simply opened up more headroom with which to push the record.

Eh. You can make the same argument for synthesizers, samplers, drum machines or anything that allows you to use midi to control instruments. At that point, you're not having to play it, so isn't that technically cheating?

Note I'm not making a point for or against either way, just pointing out that this argument taken to its logical end covers a pretty broad domain of the music industry.

> another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-tune (both the software itself as well as the general principle after which it was named)

This is mostly subjective, not objective.

(Is it being used more? Objective. Is that relevant to quality? Subjective.)