THE LOUDNESS WARS (ARE OVER)
Gather round children and let me tell you a story of a distant time called the early 1990’s. Grunge was about to sweep the world, music production was moving into the digital domain and some bright spark invented the brick wall limiter. The first widely available brick wall limiter was the Wave L1, released in 1994. If you need a refresher on what exactly a limiter does, take a look at our What Is Mastering? article, but essentially it makes music LOUDER.
This lead to an arms race of sorts throughout the latter part of the 1990’s and through the 2000’s. Mastering engineers were under pressure to make their master as loud or louder as the next song on radio or the next CD in your CD changer (remember those?). This is sometimes referred to as the loudness wars. Metallica’s Death Magnetic album is arguably the loudness wars’ most famous casualty. It was mastered so hot that it was released with audible distortion. Over 13 000 fans signed a petition signed a petition asking for it to be remastered… to no avail.
But, friends, I’m here to tell you that the Loudness Wars are over. Peace has been declared! Did everyone come to their senses and realise that ‘louder’ didn’t necessarily equate to ‘better’? Well, no. What happened is that streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube started to use an algorithm to normalise the loudness of the music on their platform. This was to stop customers being blasted by a louder song, having just turned up the volume on a previous, quieter song.
The end result is that it’s no longer advantageous to pursue loudness for loudness’s sake. There are some genres where heavy limiting has become almost part of the sound of that genre, so in those cases it might still make sense. But for the majority of rock and pop, for example, it really just makes sense to make it sound as good as possible, make it moderately loud and let the streaming platforms take care of evening out the loudness between songs.
War is over, if you want it.