Why Does All Music Sound the Same; An Explanation

+1 Geoff.
The high amount of compression is called brickwalling. The lows are pushed up and and the highs are limited by not allowing any peaks, they are all at the same level.
The result is no range in the bass, no range in the highs. All instruments lose their separation including vocals and all are at the same level, which means the same volume when played.

@n80, yeah The Struts, a breath of fresh air.
I haven't checked their releases on the DR scale, but I'll bet it's highly compressed. Fun music for the car or a party, but I won't be playing them on my system. It still irks me that all releases today are treated this way.

There is an online petition directed at the record labels to stop the Loudness Wars. Good luck with that.
Maybe if more streaming services go hires and start demanding better quality mastering, there may be some sort of change.

Streaming is why high compression will die out. No advantage to it, streaming services are set so every track seems equally loud so if they are overly compressed when recorded when they are passed through streaming services the loudness advantage is gone and they sound distorted. Probably why a lot of streamed music sounds lousy to me except for older recordings.

djones51, I hope that will be true but according to what I've read, radio stations have been doing this for years and most people who listen to Apple Music probably have Sound Check on and don't even know it.

This has not slowed down the loudness wars as far as I can tell.

And that is what seems so peculiar. SQ is being lost for the sake of loudness despite the fact that the loudness is not accomplishing the purpose that it once had. In effect engineers are making an effort to do something that has no benefit _and_ sounds bad. 

So one wonders why it is still such an issue.