Loudness wars, sidechaining etc.

[MBTC]

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.