The music industry has to take a lot of the blame. Since the mid 90s, sound quality has basically been disregarded with the only focus being on volume. Heading into the 2000s, it didn't matter whether you used CDs on a high-end Hifi, or a tin can at the end of a piece of string. The production quality of modern music is simply awful.
The result is that when the sound quality of modern music is dreadful no matter what the medium, it's easy to see why so many people are satisfied with low-quality streams, tinny iPhone speakers and the likes.
I think MP3 often gets a bum rap. Well encoded MP3s can sound virtually indistinguishable from the original CDs in blind tests, even for earlier and well-mastered music. The fault isn't the audio format being used, it's the quality of the original source material - and only the music industry can fix that by abandoning the pursuit of volume above all else and returning to sound quality as the top production priority. However even with volume normalisation becoming increasingly prevalent, most music is still mastered for volume over quality...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
