If you find yourself on this page you most likely know about the so called “loudness wars” and the over compressed state of music. You probably have read about on the Internet and could have an encyclopedic knowledge of this phenomenon. You might like me be sick of it of the whole a want to stick your head in the sand every-time it comes up.
Well The Word still have a good article about it from a couple weeks ago that I just discovered. I am glad I pulled my head out of the sand to read to it. It was written by Tom Whitwell of Music Thing. It sums things up nicely. The piece even leaves a light at the end of the tunnel which I too feel maybe could come to be. The part I found most interesting is it brought to light a little more of the reason this happens.
Form the article:
Playlists of Hot Adult Contemporary stations are determined by a computer, most likely running Google-owned Scott SS32 radio automation suite, which shuffles the playlist of 4-500 tracks, inserts ads and idents and tells the DJ when to talk. The playlist is compiled after extensive research. Two or three times a year, a company like LA-based Music Research Consultants Inc arrive in town, hire a hotel ballroom or lecture theatre and recruit 50-100 people, carefully screened for demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged 26-40). They’re each given $65 and a Perception Analyzer; a little black box with one red knob and an LED display. Then, they’re played 700 seven-second clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the song gets played. If they turn it down, it doesn’t.
If a station needs more up-to-date information (bearing in mind that they’re “designed to appeal to general listeners rather than listeners interested in hearing current releases”) they can run a call-out test, where people from the right demographic are cold-called and interrogated about 30 seven-second clips played down the phone.”
Focus groups are worthless. For example “Seinfeld” and “All in the Family” were the two worst tested shows in television history and both have the distinction of being long running #1 shows that were loved by critics as well as the people. Letting focus groups and who ever the people that do phone surveys(testing music over the phone is one of the worse ideas I have ever heard of) are choose what music gets on the radio is not a good idea. Big Music will maintain its sorry state of affairs. Having come in contact with some market research people in my line of work they seem a pretty swallow cynical self absorbed group of people that are at least as dumb as they think they are smart. Remember these people came up with such brilliant ideas as New Coke & Clear Pepsi.
A few of my own notes on this phenomenon:
You if you start looking at you music collection graphical(use what ever music software) you can actually see the music get “louder” if you go from oldest to newest. You can see the music of some artist get “louder” which each successive release. Of course this is a generalization but it is generally true.
You can find older tracks in leaving a lot of dynamic range on the table. While not as bad as the over-compressed songs of today in a lot of case it could have served the song to take advantage of a little more headroom.
The idiots running the business and new tools that are easy to abuse are most of the problem. But I think seeing the track graphically on the screen compounds the issue when combine with human nature. The is going to be more of a tendency to see all that empty room and want to fill instead seeing a song is slammed to the limit and choosing to dial it back. People start using their eyes instead of their ears which is always a bad idea in music.
I do think things will improve at least with some music. And still think there is really good new music out that is master well and sounds awesome. But…
As long Big Music’s decision are made by MBA’s that even if there are the President of the label are essentially middle management in a Mega Multinational Corporations. Things are going to be screwed up. Pushing a song because it will translate well to a ring tone or because it sounds exactly like another recent hit or pushing how a song is mastered is never going to help. The songs will remain the same as long as Big Music is Big Music and consumer stand for it.
