By Matt Dolloff (@mattdolloff)
Gotta love the internet. A study comes out and proves something minor and specific, but gets blown embarrassingly out of proportion and makes people believe in gross generalizations. It’s like a study that says eggs can slightly increase your risk of heart disease, then breeds headlines like “Eggs can KILL YOU!”
The latest? A new study claims that pop singer Taylor Swift’s chart-topping new album 1989 is technically louder than AC/DC’s Back in Black, among countless other loud rock bands like Metallica, The Sex Pistols and Motorhead.
So predictably, the headlines ran with it: Taylor Swift is louder than AC/DC! Taylor Swift is the loudest artist in the world! AC/DC can’t measure up to Taylor Swift!
And to those headlines, I say: Stop. Just stop it.
SEE ALSO: How The Who Became The World’s Loudest Band
Now I’m not dismissing the study and the conclusions it drew. Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, who conducted the study and created the below infographic, founded “Dynamic Range Day” and is one of the biggest advocates of decreasing compression of records, which would make music sound better overall. So he’s a reliable voice in this issue.
(Photo Credit: Ian Shepherd/ProductionAdvice.cok.uk)
Sure, if you pit an over-compressed pop album against a rock album from 1980, the Taylor Swift album measures “louder.” This study makes strong points about the modern “Loudness Wars” that are hurting sound quality of recordings overall – but in the way the internet has reacted to the study, they are missing the point.
AC/DC isn’t known as one of the world’s loudest bands because of their albums. It’s because of their LIVE shows.
The World Record for “Loudest Band in the World” has always been measured as the loudest recorded live performances in music, not the loudest mastered studio recordings. It’s relatively easy to make an album sound “loud” if you compress the audio enough – it’s an entirely different challenge to rattle eardrums with a thunderous live act. The Who’s studio albums show up nowhere in the study, yet are known as one of the loudest bands ever because of their live performances.
That’s where Taylor Swift, and most other modern pop stars, would fall woefully short when compared to AC/DC and other famously loud bands. The stage is where the so-called “Loudness Wars” are really won, not in the studio. To say one artist is “louder” than another based on manipulated studio recordings is utter nonsense.
Shepherd isn’t saying it’s a good thing that this bubble-gum pop star measures louder than bands that are meant to be loud. His point is that a lot of new records are being produced in ways that create artificial “loudness” and remove a lot of the warmth, depth and sharpness of the albums that aren’t lost on vinyl or uncompressed digital formats and make the music sound great in the first place.
The recordings may be manipulated to sound louder than bands who have made a living on loudness, but that doesn’t mean they actually are louder in general.
Comparing studio recordings from different eras is one thing. But I’ll believe the ridiculous notion that “Taylor Swift is louder than AC/DC” when the volume of her live performances can compete with the likes of this:
I mean, she could at least fire some cannons.
The study makes a legitimate case against over-compressed albums and artificially inflated volumes, but doesn’t actually declare Taylor Swift to be louder than any other rock band in general. So don’t worry when you see all the click-baity headlines around the internet today that claim this cutesy little pop singer is somehow “louder” than the biggest and most badass rock band on the planet right now. Just dismiss the deluge of sensationalism as internet nonsense, because that’s what it is.
