If the issue was a simple "black and white" one, the solution would be a simple "black and white" one and us engineers wouldn't have needed to fight the loudness war for more than 25 years.
I suspect that most of the time when a version is replaced by another it's mainly done to renew/renegotiate rights, or some other money stuff completely unrelated to music or what the artist wants.
It's virtually always "some other money stuff" rather than anything directly to do with rights. Record labels have seen falling revenues for nearly two decades and with barely a handful of exceptions there's no longer vast fortunes to be made from investing in making and distributing records. If the worth of the big multi-national record label corporations were still based on the "talent" under contract and revenue from new record releases, then they would ALL have collapsed and ceased to exist by now. However, they haven't collapsed, they still have market values in the billions and that's significantly based on the valuation of the back catalogues they own. In fact, most of the big label mergers/buy outs in the last 15 or so years have had nothing to do with the "talent" under contract or the skills/abilities or infrastructure of the labels being bought but everything to do with getting their hands on back catalogues. Those labels without significant back catalogues have been bought for peanuts or simply vanished entirely. Despite the appearance of the big labels, that they're still doing what they've always done (discovering and funding/nurturing new talent), what they really are, in significant part today, is dedicated to leveraging the value of their back catalogues. It's got nothing to do with what artists want and even nothing to do with music itself but everything to do with corporate/conglomerate survival and share holder belief in the value of back catalogues. In other words, there was a time when what you, audiophiles and the public wanted created a valuable market which the record companies existed to service but consumers now pay hundredths of a cent to stream a track rather than $15 to buy a CD. So, this market's value is worth a fraction of what it used to be worth and therefore, what you and the public wants is also worth a fraction of what is used to be worth!
in France it's been several years and the issue has even been dealt with when it comes to ads. we no longer have those suckers sounding twice as loud as the show we were just watching.
Unfortunately, the situation with loud TV commercials might appear to be the same as with the music loudness war but in several respects it's significantly different. Firstly, in most developed countries TV already had the infrastructure in place. The main broadcasters already had strict specifications and ingest/quality control departments to ensure those specs were met. When loudness normalisation came along, it was just a case of the broadcasters' QC departments changing to loudness normalisation specs from the previous peak based specs (or quasi-peak specs, to be more technically precise). Music broadcast though never had any technical specifications (with the exception of track duration) and has no QC infrastructure beyond what the DJ decided he/she liked. Secondly, there still isn't a specification for music, there are lots of different specifications. Youtube for example normalises to about 13LUFS, iTunes to about 16.5LUFS, CD and many music radio stations still have no loudness specifications, etc. In contrast, the TV broadcast world effectively has just two different specs and they are so similar as to not make any real difference: -24LUFS in North America, Australia and some other countries and -23LUFS in the EU and some other countries but as both allow +/- 1LUFS, you can make one mix which complies with both specs. Lastly, TV is more grounded in reality and is far less abstract than music. A car engine has to sound like a real car engine, the fizz of a sparkling beverage being opened has to sound like a real beverage being opened. Whereas a drumkit can sound like anything and in modern genres sounds absolutely nothing like a real drumkit! Music genres have evolved, from the composition and fundamental sound palette up, for the application of extreme compression.
Bob Katz's declaration several years ago that the loudness war was over, was premature because of the points above. Mastering engineers are and will still be asked to master to the loudest specs, which currently are effectively CD and/or Youtube. And, the last problem I mentioned ties back in to my previous paragraph. Those music genres which have evolved for the extreme application of compression need to evolve again, away from the extreme application of compression. Such an evolution takes time and in the past, popular music genre evolution was largely driven by someone (or group) coming out with something new/different, making a stack of cash and then others jumping on that band wagon and maybe developing the idea even further, driven by the prospect of also making a stack of cash (or hopefully an even bigger stack of cash). But, such stacks of cash no longer really exist and are therefore a decreasing incentive for genre evolution. So what is the incentive, millions of social media followers and/or Youtube views? Is that enough incentive to create real genre evolution or only enough to fragment what market there is? Who knows, but the end of the loudness war is not imminent.
G
