Understanding Mastering for Loudness Matched Streaming Platforms

Because there is a lot of confusion surrounding the loudness issue, I wrote this up to help clarify how more dynamic mixes often sound better on streaming platforms.

Streaming platforms adjust the volume of your music to keep things consistent for listeners. This process, called “loudness normalization,” can affect how your music sounds when played along side other tracks with differing dynamic range measurements.

• Simple statement on how it works: Streaming services measure the loudness of your song and then adjust it to a target level, which all songs on their service use. Mainly so users don’t have to change the volume while listening to playlists.
• Why it matters: Over-compressing your music during mastering can lead to excessive volume reduction by the streaming platform, potentially harming the sound quality, when played along side more dynamic masters.

Every major streaming platform, including Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, and SoundCloud, employs its own unique loudness normalization process for all tracks on their systems.

To ensure your music sounds its best across all streaming platforms, we carefully consider how each platform processes audio. By prioritizing headroom (preventing clipping and distortion) and dynamics (leaving space for the loudest parts), we achieve a cohesive sound while also reaching a competitive loudness level. This approach maintains more of the natural dynamics in your music, while ensuring it translates well to different streaming environments.

In other words, we take care of this for you – so you don’t have to worry about it!

Here’s a short overview of how loudness matching works.

Understanding the varied streaming service’s approach to level matching can be valuable. Here’s an explanation of how these services process your master file after upload:

Loudness Normalization is the automated process of adjusting the volume of an audio track up or down prior to streaming. This is done to match a target loudness predetermined by the streaming service.

Target Loudness: Each streaming service sets a target loudness level, often measured in LUFS (which is a perceptual loudness measurement, rather than peak levels). Many platforms aim for an integrated loudness of -14 LUFS.

This results in an automatic volume adjustment:

• If your submitted master is quieter than the target, the streaming service will increase its volume.
• If it’s too loud, the service will then decrease the volume, which these days is a normal problem. 
  

This is an example of a loud master file reading at -9dB LUFS as compared to a target of -14dB LUFS.

It will get turned down to match the streaming platform normalization standard, which in this case is -14db LUFS:

To sum it all up:

• More dynamic masters can hit harder than louder masters on level matched playlists! Drums and louder sections that have room to get loud will feel huge.
• Once loudness matched, super loud masters (much above -9LUFS) don’t sound as good, when played along side more dynamic masters!

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Definitions and specifications of each platform:

Integrated LUFS measures the overall loudness of a track over time, providing an indication of perceived loudness.

dB True Peak (dBTP) measures the absolute peak level of the audio signal, ensuring accurate peak measurement and needs to be set below 0dB LUFS in the mastering process, to prevent clipping during file encoding on their servers.

Service Targets:

Spotify utilizes ReplayGain, targeting -14 LUFS, uses the Ogg format and recommending a -1dBTP peak level.

YouTube targets -14 LUFS, uses the Opus format, primarily reducing volume if above target, and recommends a -2dBTP peak level.

Apple Music employs Apple SoundCheck, targeting -16 LUFS, uses the AAC format, and recommends a -1dBTP peak level.

Tidal targets -14 LUFS, primarily reduces volume, offers several high-quality formats (including lossless), and recommends a -0.5dBTP peak level.

Amazon Music targets -13 LUFS, primarily reduces volume, uses the MP3 format, and recommends a -1dBTP to -2dBTP peak level.

SoundCloud targets -14 LUFS, uses the MP3 format, and recommends a -2dBTP peak level.

Bandcamp uses no normalization, uses the MP3 format, and streams at lower bitrates by default so recommends a -2dBTP peak level.

Hope you found this overview helpful. For even more detail on achieving great results for your music: