1. A method of compressing object-based audio data comprising: determining a perceptual importance of objects in an audio scene, wherein the objects comprise object audio data and associated metadata; combining certain audio objects into clusters of audio objects based on the determined perceptual importance of the audio objects, wherein a number of clusters is less than an original number of audio objects in the audio scene, and wherein said combining certain audio objects into clusters comprises selecting centroids for the clusters that correspond to the audio objects having the highest perceptual importance and distributing at least one of the remaining audio objects over more than one of the clusters by panning techniques.