Loudness wars, sidechaining etc.
 

Interesting discussion on over-compression and the loudness war here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do1FJ5BcqSY

Personally I agree 100% with him. He brings up an interesting point about the shuffle feature of iPods too and unseen impact on the art of music production, although I'm not sure that shuffling songs is really terribly that much different than custom playlists so I assume he is speaking more about iPods and portable players (and trends that emerged from the digital music era).

I've also lately come to the conclusion that SIDE-CHAINING EVERYTHING IS AN ANNOYING TREND, kind of like like the homohawk hairstyle. Used very sparingly and where appropriate, side-chaining can be a value-added technique, but electronic dance music is too saturated with it these days. If every single track is pumping and throbbing, it's just fatiguing to the ears and becomes irritating, makes you want to change the channel and listen to some classic rock or something. Music is about creativity, do lets try to do some things different.

things don't need to be -12RMS to sound good

I think a lot of this is due to a overwhelming flux of new producers and would-be mastering engineers thinking mastering = slam the track with a hard limiter despite whether or not the track needs it.

in a world where everything has gone digital and labels favoring quantity over quality releases, the real mastering engineer is not necessary a dying breed, but a commodity fewer and fewer people are willing to invest in.

sad days indeed

and lol @ homohawk

I wonder also if the definition of "reference", as it applies to studio monitors, has changed over the years. Or maybe other trends like satellite radio, mp3 players and podcasts has changed what sounds good and to whom.

For example on my current car stereo (on a recent model high end car), I sometimes listen to older 80's synth music, and I don't always hear the level of detail that I remember back in the 80's. One might say it's my hearing, but I do hear the level of detail I'm talking about on certain other, newer tracks. It's almost like music mixes of a given era are optimized for the stereos / reference monitors of that era.