Yes indeed, it's too much compression, especially at the mastering stage.
The top professional audio engineers all know it's happening and hate it, but it's driven by the bands and their marketing people who all want their CDs to be as loud as possible because that makes more (short term) impact on the radio or when played in sequence with other CDs. Except now they're ALL squashed to death, you have to do it or everyone wonders why your CD sounds so quiet and weedy.

It's also the reason why BBC radio 3 seems so quiet. It's about the only radio station that doesn't compress its output (not much any way, maybe a bit of peak limiting). Classic FM sounds weidrly relentless and in-your-face by comparison.

Interestingly, to get best results through the compressors used on radio, you need to start with a CD with less or no compression - then the broadcast compressor will actually do a better job of making it all sound louder.

The only thing it has to do with digital technology is that the multiband compression techniques that are used, and phase rotation, and a whole load of other tricks (see Robert Orban's articles on how it's done) are relatively easy to implement digitally.

Anahata