This article first appeared in issue 236 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.
In his superb book How Music Works, Talking Heads’ David Byrne suggests that there’s too much music in the world. He doesn’t mean it in the sense that we need to catch up with what’s already been released before letting anybody make any more; he means that there’s no escape from it.
Every shop has speakers, every phone system its hold music, every EPG its soundtrack, every lift or mall or transport terminal its muzak and every bus the chukka-chiss of someone’s iPod turned up too loud. In the unlikely event that we find ourselves in a music-free zone, more often than not we’ll stick in the earbuds or turn on the car stereo.
We’ve gone from sonic scarcity to an abundance of audio, and that means we’re exposed to more music than ever before – but we’re paying less attention to it, and as a result music has to try harder to catch our attention. That’s where the so-called Loudness Wars come from, with mastering engineers using compressors to effectively squash entire songs into a small clump of frequencies in order to make them sound as loud as possible. In many cases, that means today’s winsome folkies produce records that sound significantly louder than older, more dynamic records by genuinely loud bands such as The Who, Pixies or Slayer.
Something very similar is happening online with information, and the more we move to a largely ad-funded content economy, the more we shall see content subject to its own kind of loudness war.
