You notice how a music album from 2004 is louder than the album you purchased back in the 1990s? Some 10 years or 20 years ago began a trend in mastering where albums were purposely made louder than usual for "better audio."

If you ever pick up the Beatles album from the 1960s and compare it to the 2005 remasters you'll hear the difference. 2005 album is significantly louder, more pumping, and sounds awfully better.

What is this whole stupid trend called? It's called the Loudness War, where the producers of music entertain themselves by fucking your ears.

According to Wikipedia:

"The loudness war or loudness race is a pejorative name for the apparent competition to digitally master and release recordings with relatively higher real and perceived levels of loudness."

I can't stand this trend. I've been making music recently for a bunch of people who keep telling me that the song isn't loud enough. I argue that if I make it any louder, it would distort all volumes and make the whole song sound like a piece of shit. They request it anyway.

Oh hey, let me explain before I go too deep. See, when you turn the bass up on your stereo system, you can't hear the treble or the higher frequencies. Usually the bass booms so loud that the treble gets disrupted hence distortion occurs. That's what I'm saying. Why does the bass need to be fucking loud? Cause it feels good? Sure it does.

Upon making a music track I encounter a bajillion requests including shit like "turn up the bass." I usually do not comply to that because there's already enough of it, and adding more would be up to the DJ, producers, and whoever. I leave the auditory controls up to you so you don't have to make the song sound like a piece of crap.

The problem with today's music is that it's so loud that everything is fucked up. We have no auditory dynamics of any kind. In fact we lose all the graceful dynamics that existed before.



The picture you see above is from the Wikipedia page of Loudnesswars. Note the significant increase in "loudness" as the years go on.

Beyond THAT point, increasing the audio is just as bad as distorting the audio. It's like taking the whole album and shitting on it. I swear. It's a bad trend that many people don't understand well.

So if you wonder why your stereo system makes crappy noises, it maybe not just because your stereo system is a piece of shit, but the music itself has been mastered to be a piece of shit.

And hey, listening to loud stuff everyday results in a slow decline of your hearing. If you think that it's fine, it's not. The fact that you're yelling "WHAT?" after pulling your earphones out is just a small sign that says "Hey my hearing's gone down because I pump loud music right into my ears." Yeah, wait until you can't hear anything. The world around you becomes smaller and smaller until you hear nothing.

I'm warning you because I can't hear much of the world anymore. It's not because of loud music but because of an accident. It's ruptured my ears. My world is smaller than yours, and I have to live with it.

You can read more about loudness war here: [link]