Articles

I've produced music professionally for 20 years now, and this is literally a gut-wrenching battle for me everytime I finish an album and have to master for the market place.
There have been numerous advances in the studio - and recorded music can be stunning, emotional, subtle, etc. And, hopefully, if done well it is. Then comes the horrific compromise/trade-off of modern mastering.
You're article covers almost all the key points - except one. The modern music "store", be it Itunes or any other download service, or for that matter the traditional CD shop listening station - has crappy fidelity. Most notably the amplifiers on ipods, computers, and most all portable music systems do not have enough power to represent low frequencies without "clouding" out the entire spectrum. An easy way around this is also achieved in the "loudness war". Band limit the low end, and push the whole record up - it'll be "loud as hell" on any home computer or ipod, without over taxing the amplifier. The bad news is - you'll want to gouge your eyes out after 10 minutes or so.

Here's the sad part. Many of the very worst offenders - most notably the last Outkast, or Alicia Keys for example - become huge hit records. Thereby pushing the desirable "standard" even further. In the world of audio mastering, everyone knows who the worst "offenders" are - but how can you argue with someone who's working constantly and has a pile of gold records! Any A&R guy's gonna just say, make it as "hype" as that Alicia Keys etc. The same phenomenon happens in all aspects of the contemporary culture. The colors are saturated in film, tv, and photography - and for the same reason - grab people's attention in the brief time you have, you're competing with an awfully noisy popular culture. It may be time for me to move to the woods and take up ukelele...