Music production in recent years has been dominated by a Loudness War. CD sound is 16 bits at 44.1kHz, so there's an upper limit on amplitudes and RMS noise value; nevertheless using audio compression (not compression of the digital encoding to MP3, but literally squashing the peaks down to fit inside the 16bit limit, while suggesting to the ear that the sound is so loud it would need more bits to represent it). Record companies found that louder music seemed more impressive regardless of its other qualities, so they started insisting on heavy heavy audio compression so that it sounds like you're listening underwater. The more one company did it, the more their competitors had to out-do them.
I think the same thing is going on between butter and bread. The bread manufacturers want to have the softest bread, so soft that any butter will tear it. The butter makers, on the other hand, want to prove that their butter is so soft it can be spread onto wet tissue paper and leave the paper intact. Of course, this is not the loudness war - its the softness war.
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