Today I have been carrying out research on the “loudness war” and how it affects commercially released music. Many believe modern music sounds worse now then it ever has in 2006 Bob Dylan said “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.”

Sourcing an article from SoundOnSound Magazine called “Dynamic Range & The Loudness War” they sampled 4500 songs well received ‘pop’ music pieces recorded and produced between 1969 and 2010, normalized them so they peak at 0dB , and measured their RMS value(is the effective value of the total waveform). The graph shows a constant growth in average levels between 1982 and 2005, and today’s records are roughly 5dB louder than they were in the ’70s.

It is important to be aware of the standard commercial music is being released at, and when I am mastering my tracks I will make sure to turn up the threshold so it can compete with commercial releases in terms of “loudness”.

“It’s easy to find people, documents, web pages and so on that unanimously blame the loudness war for damaging music. Many of them also link the loudness war to a reduction in “dynamic range”, though they usually don’t explain what dynamic range might be……So what’s the problem with the loudness war? Obviously, limiting does something ‘wrong’ with the signal, otherwise people wouldn’t be complaining so much — even though they apparently point at the wrong signal descriptor.”

References

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war