Labels bring to the table the ability to work with experienced audio engineers,etc, but IMO it's debatable how much of that makes its way into the final product since most CDs have no dynamic range.
I thought that music normalized to -13dBFS was as bad as it could get, but I discovered a new low: some recently-released dance music I examined had an RMS of -7dBFS over the entire song, including silent parts. Highlighting just the active parts of the song showed an RMS of -5 to -6dBFS. ReplayGain scanning says it needed almost 20dB of gain reduction to match reference volume levels.
The sad reality is that music with no dynamic range sounds pretty good on audio systems with no dynamic range and no headroom, which basically describes most car, retail bookshelf, and personal playback (i.e. MP3 player with cheap earbuds) systems. To get a similar volume level but while preserving full dynamic range would require 20dBV (i.e. ten times) more amplifier power, not to mention better speakers, quieter listening environments, etc.
I have a friend who's a professional engineer at a local studio and after working on some filler for some vocalists (simple drum/guitar parts quickly banged out so they had something to listen to while recording), I got to hang around and see famous musician X's sibling attempt to record vocal tracks. They were so awful that musician X had to sing along so the vocalist could hear it in the monitor to get close enough to the pitch so the auto tuner could make something that didn't sound like a robot. After seeing that, I am no longer surprised at the state of any recent music recordings or compositions. I first noticed the massive over-use of compression in the mid-90's, and it's only gotten worse since then.
There is one area where I don't have a problem with massive compression, duckers, limiting, and so on, and that's in concerts and dance clubs. Using duckers and limiters to "pulse" parts of the audio track between beats simulates the ear's own gain control, and makes music feel a lot louder than it is, so more dancing can be done at safer volume levels.
That's a temporary problem, and one that the market will solve. As independently produced music becomes the norm, a new model will emerge for high-end post-production work. I would imagine that contract-for-service work will become the norm, or perhaps engineers connected with studios for hire. That sort of thing.
