Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
replyWhat RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
replyThe ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
Agreed
replyOr make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.