Have you read Ian Shepherd‘s blog posting entitled How Spotify might defuse the Loudness Wars. A post where he beautifully presented his case but got his facts wrong. What did he do about it? Anyone who follows Ian will know the quality of his content and respect him so it wasn’t a surprise when he apologised to Spotify, edited the post whilst leaving the original text for clarity, and notified everyone of the change.
Ian has also followed up this article with Why I was wrong about Spotify. Both our definitely worth a visit.
Like Ian, I love Spotify. The rapidly expanding music catalogue delivers a huge diversity of choice; I thoroughly enjoyed discovering Quincy Jones‘ Early Jazz Years album last week. Recently it has been extremely useful for quickly looking up tracks when clients request sound-a-likes and tracks in-the-style-of.
I have noticed in use that Spotify takes a happy medium for it’s loudness normalization by increasing the volume of quieter tracks and reducing the louder ones. To reiterate Ian’s thoughts on this feature, done properly in players, it might indeed defuse the Loudness Wars. I would like to see a slider option, with say five increments of how the normalisation would operate to give choice to the end listener but, for now, Spotify has taken a step in the right direction.
You can join Ian on Twitter (@ianshepherd) and check out his fantastic Production Advice website.
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