Well most of the commercial stuff is mastered & processed digitally..
Just take such a track, and import it into Wavelab or Soundforge. Check out the wave patterns and the frequency spectrum by Fast Fourier Transform. You will see instantly that there is something wrong..

The wavepatterns are so compressed and finallized that the maximum of the tops are cut-off. There are no more nice wavy soundlandscapes. Meaning the normal sinus / cosinus patterns. They just pushed it to far to let the music sound hard.

Question: Are we dealing with a bad situation over here? Well it's probably something we (read consumer and record companies) wan't, so we get it!! But should we accept this?