FWIW, geoff emerick makes mention of the current volume wars in "my life recording the beatles", and makes a point mention that even in the early 60's, the goal of mastering(aside from prepping the mixes for production, of course) was to end up with the hottest, loudest, mix for the radio
i know that what they did then pales in comparison to the mangling that goes on now, but i just thought i'd mention that trying to get your master louder than the other guy's is something that's been going on for a long time now...
The loudness wars actually start way earlier than even the 60s. They go all the way back to even before the "golden age" of AM radio in the 1920s and 30s, when they first pioneered the idea of compression to try and push as much of the signal up towards 100% modulation as possible, because that extended the legal broadcast range of the radio station.
The difference is, though, that the fidelity was limited at almost every stage back then anyway; such signal mangling not only diddn't ruin the sounce, it actually had the effect - if done well - of making things sound *better*, and not worse. (CKLW out of Detroit/Windsor, for example, was famous in the 60s for just plain making 45rpm singles sound better because of the proprietary (read: homebrew) compression circuitry they threw in front of the transmitter.)
And in the 50s and 60s of course they optimized their singles to sound good on radio - though that was not necessarily true of the album cuts; it was often just the mastering on the 45s. And even on the rest of the stuff, things were mixed/mastered always with an eye towards whether it would reproduce on radio well or not.
But the idea from the 1920s to the 1980s was always to used the loudness to make things sound better, not *just* louder. There was a line that most would not cross where they would go for as loud as they could without sacrificing quality. Sure, the medium limited things somewhat, but the engineers and producers did also keep a healthy respect for the content, because they knew that "high fidelity" also sold records, not just high volume. What's different in the 1990-? interation of the wars is that it's pretty much full speed ahead on the loudness, quality be damned.
"How does it sound? How should I know? I just need it at -9dB RMS or better if I'm going to compete. I'll leave it up to the engineers to get that square peg to sound good in my round hole. (Oh, and don't forget to boost the chorus to -6dBRMS while you're at it, because we've already smashed the life out of any dynamic hooks the music may have had in it, so let's use even more volume to put a hook back in."
G.