Sadly, I think that the technical reason that music sucks today will never get the exposure it needs. Even catchy music today is fatiguing and quickly tiresome because of dynamic compression. There have been plenty of good songs over the last couple of decades that are basically intolerable because they're a wall of noise.
The "loudness war" has ruined popular music. Not only everything that has come out since the late '90s, but everything "remastered" since then as well. It's probably the greatest crime against art in history, because of its scope and insidiousness. And when we lose original recordings (as in the Universal fire), we may be left with ruined trash.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle -- music's been digitized and things that used to be expensive and difficult are now cheap and easy, as Beato says.
Out of anyone, Apple seems to be doing the most to fight this. They have been pushing producers to provide high quality recordings via their digital master programme, and have loudness normalisation enabled by default.
I often find the quality available on AM to be superior to other platforms.
You can't restore what was destroyed in mastering, regardless of the delivery medium.
Apple would have to implement requirements for dynamic range, something that is somewhat feasible now with the ascendancy of LUFS as a measurement standard. But I doubt they'll actually impose rules.
That's too bad, because our only hope to reverse this idiotic trend is for the delivery conduits to say nope to ruined trash. Netflix has set technical requirements for content acquisition; Apple could and should do the same.
What makes this crime all the more galling is that dynamic compression can be applied by the playback device. You don't have to ruin the recording. My mid-'90s Ford CD player had a simple button on it, labeled "Compress."
I respect the idea, but in practice I find that Apple Music sometimes plays tracks from the same album at noticeably different volumes. It's possible (even probable, I guess) that whoever is sending Apple the digital masters messed up, but frankly when I'm listening to an album front-to-back that's one situation where I basically need the perceived volume level to not be messed with.
Weirdly enough, I've noticed this happens with and without the sound normalization feature enabled.
The "loudness war" has ruined popular music. Not only everything that has come out since the late '90s, but everything "remastered" since then as well. It's probably the greatest crime against art in history, because of its scope and insidiousness. And when we lose original recordings (as in the Universal fire), we may be left with ruined trash.