> the loudness wars have largely ended I've been digging up a lot of remastered 80s albums from the last 5-7 years (mainly Japanese stuff), and I can 100% tell

> the loudness wars have largely ended I've been digging up a lot of remastered 80s albums from the last 5-7 years (mainly Japanese stuff), and I can 100% tell you that this is not the case. The engineers may not be sucking every last decibel out of the tracks anymore, but they're still compressed to hell, dynamic range often 5-10dB less than the original version straight off the 80s-era CD. If you think about the way normalization works, there's still benefit to slapping a master limiter on top of it and pushing it to the point where normalization doesn't require any gain, because at least then you have control over the final mastering chain. But I don't think this is the reason, and I don't really know why they still juice it hard. Maybe for car stereos, or because phone amps are weak, or because they're not thinking about Spotify specifically.