The loudness war

I’ve been thinking lately about self-regulation and how it’s sometimes impossible for a group to self-regulate. Currently it’s the AI race in regards to using any available content to train models, legal or illegal.

In the mid-2000s people took soundbites from a game to piece together a better Metallica album because their own release was just the loudness war turned to eleven.

The loudness war was a war where everyone lost. Artists got albums so crushed that fans had to fix them.

Then streaming platforms normalized everything to the same volume. The arms race became pointless overnight. An algorithm changed the incentive structure.

Self-regulation fails when defection is the only rational move. Right now AI companies are in their own loudness war. Train on everything. Legal or not. Because if you don’t, your competitor will.

The question is what external force changes the game this time.