Almost everyone has accidentally turned on FM radio or an iPod and been assaulted by a wave of sound that makes you want to jump out of your skin. Sadly, this assault is intentional.

 For several years, recorded music has been slowly increasing in volume, and now it is getting unbearable. This is a trend in recording music referred to as “the loudness war.”

This is a result of an audio engineering technique known as compression, in which a music file is shrunk to fit into a CD or MP3 file. Through this process, the music becomes louder, and the entire song becomes the same volume.

Why would record labels and artists want that? For the same reason television commercials turn their volumes up – they want to catch people’s attention in order to sell the product. Increasing volume is apparently the easiest way.

This practice has attracted a horde of critics who believe compression erases the subtlety, power and dynamics of recorded music and in extreme cases, can distort the recordings into unrecognizable mush.

The beginning of the loudness war as we know it started in the ‘80s with competition between radio stations and the advent of digital audio. 

According to Greg Milner’s book “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music,” the first stations to realize that compression equaled loudness and therefore profit were New Jersey’s Z-100 and New York’s WPLJ. 

The stations got so crazy chasing volume that the Federal Communications Commission had to step in. But the damage was done, because as a result of the new sound, Z-100 went from a virtually unknown station to the top player in New York, where WPLJ used to be. Musicians and record companies had heard the stations and seen this success, and wanted their records to have the loud, compressed treatment.

The most infamous example of the loudness war was Metallica’s 2009 album “Death Magnetic,” which was so compressed and distorted that fans and critics publicly complained in droves. 

Fortunately, there have been some counteroffensives launched in this war. Streaming sites like Pandora and Spotify have started putting limits on how loud songs can be, and things may be starting to change, with engineers saying that volume is no longer a top priority for some of their more recent works.

Like all wars, the loudness war has to end eventually, with even the most volume hungry fanatics burning themselves out.