WHAT? As if anyone on the planet would go over to the changer, eject this allegedly offending CD, look at the label, and then declare, "Welp, I'm never buying another album put out on Arista records!"
The utter stupidity of it is mind-boggling.
And add to that the fact that, if people wanted compression so much, it could be done by THE PLAYER. In fact, this used to be done. My 1996 Mustang's CD player has a "Compress" button on it, to make listening to highly dynamic music more feasible in a noisy car environment.
I believe _this_ is where the issue mostly originated (well, radio, really). Radio is already massively compressed, and many people were either listening to things in the car, on some tiny little radio in the kitchen, or with awful cheap headphones with their walkman's built-in radio.
All of these weren't great environments to start with, and the dynamic range of radio was tiny given the overall bandwidth available to most FM stations.
So, companies compress, people get used to it, and thus the horror continues.
But of course it wasn't, and before long I realized that I liked the sound of the records better.
Maybe, but I strongly suspect that her preference is a great example of LISTENER fatigue caused by the dynamic compression that has destroyed all post-'90s releases.
I wish Apple and Spotify would somehow put the boot down and reject ruined masters, the way Netflix dictates technical quality for new material. That's really the only hope of fighting the "loudness war" that has ruined music for 25 years now.
Your daughter, and a vast numbers of her peers who are so into '80s music, should be a wakeup call on this issue. But unfortunately there are very few people who even understand what it is... even artists who decry the shitty quality of today's recordings often blame data compression and want to increase sampling rates or bit depth. NO. The problem is dynamic compression. Period.