aaronmcoleman
The truth is out there!
I don't think "good music" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive, i think its all too easy to claim that the successfull ones have "sold out" or just creating bad music. But millions of people buy Lady Gaga's records, how many buy yours? +is that because those millions of people are stupid? I think its easy for musicians to lose sight of what people who don't actually know how to play/recrd music want to hear. Btw not having a go at you at all bob, im guilty of all this myself!
Yeah some good and popular music actually does have dynamics. I am listening to Wilco right now and not all of their songs are blasting me in the face the entire time. My ears don't get fatigued and it sounds great. Same thing when I listen to my old records at home. I like it, most of you like it, but it's not coming back to mainstream music anytime soon.
I think this is mostly an effect of how people listen to music. In the 60s-80s music was listened to at home on at least decent speakers, and radio stations did their own compression to get the music up in the car. Now the same CD/MP3 is listened to at home, in the car, on crappy laptop speakers, through awesome systems. This massive amount of compression and loss of dynamics is just a result of how music is listened to, and shouldn't be seen as a good or bad thing.