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Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars
Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely. Same story as with banking. Those regulated pushed to do away with the regulations and then really bad things happened. It's all about greed.
A fair amount of freedom in running businesses and healthy competition is usually good. But the changes made in broadcast ownership REDUCED competition. And if investment bankers want to be involved in high risk investments it should be only with fund owned by those willing to take the risks, not with taxpayer insured depositors money from traditional savings/checking banking.
Broadcasters traditionally have an important role to serve the public interest. If we did away with PAID radio/tv political ads, using only fairly doled out community service time, there'd be far less money inviting corruption in campaigns. Obviously limiting fund-raising has failed. But doing away with a major part of the spending would really help.
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago? Blame the FCC rule change on ads. Stations used to voluntarily pick a limit on how many minutes an hour of ads they run, and could exceed that two weeks a year. So ads would go nuts before Christmas (and elections when held). Now that insanely heavy level of ads has become the norm.
Such a tool was actually ruled illegal in the US, prior to 2005. Then congress passed a law, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, to overturn the court decision and thus make 'parential controls' legal, under pressure from the pro-family crowd and a sympathetic group of republicans. Including Hatch.
But, being a Hatch bill, it also increased the penalty for noncommercial copyright infringement with a three year jail sentence if the work infringed was not yet published for public distribution. Ten years for repeat infringement... and that in addition to all of the already-existing civil and criminal penalties.
Just a little harsher, and they can start on the executions.