😂😂

Not in my local scene

Alchemist albums were abrasively loud a decade ago

(Citation required)

Engineers opted for the darker sound profile, as characterized by prominent highs and lows. On the bright side these soundscapes don’t sound as harsh in comparison with brighter sound profile, being the forefront of 2000’s music.

most services have loudness normalization at this point anyway

lot of these remasters lately have been quiet on my systems

I was gonna say lol, knxwledges sound has always been super compressed

None of the albums you listed are the type of albums that would be the subject of the loudness wars to begin with so this doesn’t really mean anything

Not saying whether or not the trend has reversed, but your selections provide zero insight into that

You’d think this would be incredibly obvious to an “audio connoisseur” such as yourself but it’s clear you’re just up your own ass

I agree a lot of music doesn't utilize volume and other aspects of music theory (different time signatures etc). But pop music will always appeal to the lowest common denominator. Any complexity you add is the loss of potential listeners

plz dont laugh the 2024 white-pill is so crucial

MUSIC!

-me

Stopped reading after OP mentioned J Cole.

Na we’ve had some of the loudest albums very recently. Example JpegMafia and Danny Brown album

True but there are still ways you can master/mix your songs so they are louder than others on streaming service.
I normal master will make you song obviously quieter than your normal mainstream song.

“Astroworld” by Travis Scott is an example of an album that is mastered loud as f***(audible clipping), and the album is very loud on streaming services.
“Blond” by Frank Ocean is an example of an album that is mixed and master with allot of dynamics.

At the end of the day… as long as there is a limited on how loud you, the listener, can turn up the music on your listening device, in most cases the phone, the loudness war will continue, because to the average listener, louder is better.

Music will be mixed and mastered in accordance to the intent of the artist and engineer.

The loudness wars as they existed do not exist in the same way.

Loudness in modern music from the way I see it isn't a metric of just lufs as most music people listen to is normalized. The "loudness" or what is associated with loudness is now the characteristics that are associated with higher lufs masters. So the soft clipping, compression, limiting it took to get to that higher lufs imposing certain characteristics onto the song. No dynamics is a part of this. But low dynamics in some music sounds good.

It's a creative choice. If you take two songs one not clipped and one clipped to hell and export them at the same lufs. People may prefer the one limited to s*** b/c it sounds a different way now.

It used to be a different, you had to be loud to be competitive on the radio or sum s*** cuz nothing was normalized. So music that didn't benefit from being loud AF would loose out, but now for the most part artist who want there projects to be dynamic and not loud, are making there projects dynamic and not loud.

So it's a non issue, artist who want there s*** to sound loud and insolent are doing that, and artist who want dynamics are doing that. As long as they don't have a s***ty engineer...