You are talking about (dynamic) compression applied to an entire song with the sole purpose of making it as loud as possible to the human ear but still complyin

You are talking about (dynamic) compression applied to an entire song with the sole purpose of making it as loud as possible to the human ear but still complying to the max allowed peaks (or to the energy of the signal). This does degrade the quality, sometimes heavily. Nevertheless it is done by mastering engineers (they rarely enjoy it) as well as by radio and tv stations extensively because of the psycho-acoustic fact that a songs appears to be better if it is played louder. This gives them an advantage over the competition: On average, people searching for a radio station are more likely to listen to your radio station if it is louder than the competition. The main issue lies in the fact that the current peak measurement of audio signals does only marginally correlate with the perceived loudness and heavy compression is used to trick this system. The broadcasting industry is aware of this. An open and quite effective loudness measurement algorithm [0] has been introduced a few years ago and it gets slowly adapted all over the world by new broadcasting laws: AGCOM 219/09/CSP (Italy), ARIB TR-B32 (Japan), ATSC A/85 PRSS CALM Act (US), EBU R128 (Europe) and OP-59 (Australia). iTunes Soundcheck is also based on [0] and since this year Youtube applies this to newly uploaded videos as well [1]. Even games use [0] to keep their audio at a consistent loudness. So slowly, the over-usage of compression does not give music producers and broadcasters any advantage anymore and beautiful dynamic music will be competitive again. I have collected some links [2] about this topic. Because of the lack of any affordable implementation at the time I created one myself [3] with some additional notes [4]. [0] ITU-R BS.1770, http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-201510-I!!PDF-E.pdf http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-2... [1] http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ http://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/ [2] https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness https://www.klangfreund.com/lufsmeter/manual/#about_loudness [3] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter [4] https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/developmentNotes https://github.com/klangfreund/LUFSMeter/tree/master/docs/de...