Comment by entropicdrifter
Comment by entropicdrifter 2 hours ago
Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average)
Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic range for the content/intended usage. Some stuff still gets slammed with compression/limiters, but it's mostly club music from what I can tell.
This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then the separate radio edit which had the compression that the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on the leased line to the transmitter site.
And of course it would have all the dirty words removed or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "funky kicks going down in the city" in Jet Airliner
I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics, or because of the studios wanting to save money and only pay for the radio edit. Possibly both - reduced production costs and not having to pay big-name engineers. "My sister's cousin has this plug-in for his laptop and all you do is click a button"...