Music is getting louder. It looks like your parents were right. Echo Nest, a Boston-based startup that builds music recommendation engines for folks like Spotify, just released a study analyzing the top 5,000 songs since 1950.

The average volume of songs climbed steadily until about 1990 when rock just cranked the volume up. From that point onwards, the graph continues to shoot upwards.

"Louder" doesn't mean the actual volume of the music. Instead it is a measure that considers the difference between the softest part of the song and the loudest part. Over time, the softest parts of songs have been getting louder while the loudest part is getting closer to the max.


The study also found that music has also been getting more consistently energetic. That means, more mix of volume, beats, structural changes and instrument sounds. Interesting? [FastCo]

Did it start with this: