Music maker here. This is referred to as the loudness war. Part of the reason songs started getting more and more compressed and loud is due to changes in how people consume music.
People used to listen to full albums and use nice speakers a lot more often. I'm not saying they don't anymore, but a lot of music now is instantly available, switching between artists a lot, and listened to from a phone or laptop.
I know if I release a track, about 90% of people will play it on their phone, so I usually mix and master to my phone.
Furthermore if your song is louder, it probably stands out more than the next persons.
However this kind of sucks because you start losing the nuance of volume dynamics which is an entire dimension of music. When you compress a song and make it as loud as possible it's the same volume the whole way.
I'll admit I still do this because I'm still trying my best to get myself out there and have people interested in my music. I recall even spotify's official playlist placement recommendation was to have your song start strong right away, not having an intro or a build up. My newest song has a minute of strong buildup before the crescendo of drums and vocals going up an octave (very radiohead/thome yorke-y). I didn't even bother submitting for playlist consideration lol. (That takes at least a month anyway).
AMA about this stuff I'm bored!
Edit: since this is sparking some production discussion I'd kill for some honest constructive criticism on my most recent project. Sucking at something is the first step towards being kind of good at something and I'm trying really hard to be kind of good at this!
![image showing Music Loudness by Genre [OC]](685be33b-4bf8-5a27-8d9e-5950221fa1e8.jpg)
TownAfterTown on December 2nd, 2019 at 11:28 UTC »
Do a search on "compression war" or "loudness war" for context on why this is going on and why all the radio-popular genres basically look the same.
HandHoldingClub on December 2nd, 2019 at 11:34 UTC »
Music maker here. This is referred to as the loudness war. Part of the reason songs started getting more and more compressed and loud is due to changes in how people consume music.
People used to listen to full albums and use nice speakers a lot more often. I'm not saying they don't anymore, but a lot of music now is instantly available, switching between artists a lot, and listened to from a phone or laptop.
I know if I release a track, about 90% of people will play it on their phone, so I usually mix and master to my phone.
Furthermore if your song is louder, it probably stands out more than the next persons.
However this kind of sucks because you start losing the nuance of volume dynamics which is an entire dimension of music. When you compress a song and make it as loud as possible it's the same volume the whole way.
I'll admit I still do this because I'm still trying my best to get myself out there and have people interested in my music. I recall even spotify's official playlist placement recommendation was to have your song start strong right away, not having an intro or a build up. My newest song has a minute of strong buildup before the crescendo of drums and vocals going up an octave (very radiohead/thome yorke-y). I didn't even bother submitting for playlist consideration lol. (That takes at least a month anyway).
AMA about this stuff I'm bored!
Edit: since this is sparking some production discussion I'd kill for some honest constructive criticism on my most recent project. Sucking at something is the first step towards being kind of good at something and I'm trying really hard to be kind of good at this!
timdadummm on December 2nd, 2019 at 13:11 UTC »
How did you measure the Loudness? There's tons of ways to measure loudness, from maximum to average to RMS, LUFS, etc.