Another step towards ending the Loudness War

I never thought that youtube would help with music quality.  ;-)

nevermind

Not sure there's anything particularly significant here. For a start, I'd be a bit surprised if youtube weren't doing some kind of volume riding. Whatever they're doing, the adverts are still more "in your face" than the actual videos themselves much of the time. The same kind of effect as cable/satellite TV, at least in the UK, where you get the volume for the film/programme set so you can hear it then the adverts/announcements, which are all squished like mad so you can't possibly ignore them, hit so hard they're painful.
 
The real issue with the "volume wars" isn't so much the maximum volume (easily adjusted via the volume knob) or necessarily even the RMS compared to peak. It's the practice of compressing and limiting in such a way that there's no (or little) variation in dynamic range left. CD has a huge dynamic range compared to vinyl, yet commercial recordings from entire genres seem to only use a few dB of that range, if that.
 
I've CD and high-quality vinyl copies of the same album, the CD and vinyl being released on the same day. The mastering of the two versions is quite different, partly because vinyl can't cope with the extended dynamic range of CD or the amount of bass CD can handle of course. But along with that the vinyl is much less brick-walled, which means it actually has as large and more frequent dynamic changes in it than the CD does. I keep meaning to ask the band whether this was deliberate or not, and if deliberate why they chose to do this. Whatever, both work musically and it's an interersting contrast.

Sorry, I believe there are some misunderstandings here.

Obviously the loudness war is about perceived volume. The RESULT of this is that people started compressing their tracks more and more so that, even though they would still peak at near 0dB, the perceived volume of the entire track would be higher. The significance of this article isn't that YouTube is normalizing audio, it's that they're adjusting volume by perceived level rather than peak level, taking away the INCENTIVE for producers to push their whole track near 0dB, because it simple won't sound louder than that of their fellows anymore. In other words; it rewards dynamic productions. Spotify and iTunes have already stepped into this too. There is a lot of work still to be done but it is a significant step in the right direction.

Of course you don't go to YouTube for high quality sound. But most people don't look for high quality sound to begin with. We've all produced stuff that ends up on YouTube, and you still want it to sound decent because countless people find your music there for the first time.