Um... wait a minute... you want there to be a standard of 24bit audio because the current mixing/mastering practices push to the very limit of 16bit audio in terms of bits available for loudness without overlimiting?
That makes absolutely no sense to me. That's basically saying we should raise the speed limit on all roads because too many people are speeding. What makes you think that clients won't request that their music be limited even louder with the new-found freedom of not digitally distorting at their previous limits?
What you really need to petition for is educating music listeners that louder does not equal better, and that dynamic range is a good thing, and that if they want the song to be louder, they can simply turn up their volume knobs.
Raising to 24 bit doesn't increase quality. It extends dynamic range, and 16bit has plenty of room for dynamic range if you're not trying to maximize loudness by overcompressing. This is completely in the hands of the artists request when in a studio, and whether the audio engineer obliges. Petition them. Petition the listeners. Don't petition for a higher ceiling to "fix" a problem that doesn't exist because of a ceiling. BTW, overcompression will happen regardless of whether you can raise the overall volume to 16bit 0db, or otherwise. The problem doesn't exist in the limit. It exists in the reason people overcompress to begin with.
You stop the loudness war by stopping the idea that your waveforms need to be straight blocks in order to be "good". Not by giving everyone even more headroom to work with to make their habits even worse. Sorry, but this petition seems like the most ass-backward thing I've ever seen, and that's coming from a hobby audio engineer of 13 years.
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