How the loudness war escalated
The loudness war refers to the decades-long trend of mastering recordings progressively louder to stand out on radio and playlists. Because digital audio has a fixed maximum level, increasing perceived loudness means raising the average level toward that ceiling, which requires heavy compression and limiting. This reduces dynamic range, the difference between the quietest and loudest moments, often flattening transients and introducing distortion on the most aggressively mastered records.
The reversal toward loudness normalization
Average commercial loudness climbed across the CD era, with many tracks pushed far above earlier norms by the mid-2000s. The trend reversed once streaming platforms adopted loudness normalization, playing every track back at a comparable target (commonly around minus 14 LUFS), which removed the competitive advantage of a hot master and could even penalize over-compressed tracks by turning them down. Mastering practice has since shifted back toward preserving dynamics, since extra loudness no longer translates into being heard louder.