Records that fight for airplay (and whatever it amounts to these days) always had single versions with some compression or limiting to make them more punchy to stand out from other hits on the radio. And that was often up to the discretion of the producer and management, whereas the album version could remain relatively untouched.
The loudness wars were also a side effect of this, especially for artists that clamored for hits rather than cared about sound quality--if one artist had an album out, the next artist wanted theirs to be louder, and so on. A more traditional jazz radio station would tend to play better sounding records than one who pushes $mooth Jazz, as a lot of that music is also quite compressed or brickwalled.
The loudness wars were also a side effect of this, especially for artists that clamored for hits rather than cared about sound quality--if one artist had an album out, the next artist wanted theirs to be louder, and so on. A more traditional jazz radio station would tend to play better sounding records than one who pushes $mooth Jazz, as a lot of that music is also quite compressed or brickwalled.
Something similar could happen with an album like Face Value. Collins recorded a lot of those tracks at home on his own modest equipment as an outlet for what he was feeling at the time, and only later had Hugh Padgham come in and mix and enhance them, adding other musicians as needed. Similarly Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have recently said in an interview that when they set up their own studio and recorded Janet Jackson's breakthrough album Control, they similarly had no clue, and yet that album had the same "magic" that caught on with the fans and record buyers. It's an interesting read.