Mastering for Spotify: how loud is right?

Loudness on the streaming services

Every big streaming service measures your song’s loudness in LUFS (loudness units relative to full scale) and turns it to a common level, so listeners don’t have to touch the volume between songs. This is called loudness normalisation.

Integrated loudness, as the services publish it. They adjust these now and then.

To see how your own song will play on each service, measure it with the free loudness checker: it runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded.

So should you master to −14 LUFS?

Not necessarily. A master at −14 LUFS keeps the most dynamics and plays at full level on Spotify. But most released music is louder: around −7 to −10 LUFS for pop, rock, hip-hop and electronic music, because a dense, loud master has a sound of its own. On Spotify, such a song is simply turned down, and it sounds about as loud as everything else.

What matters is that the master still sounds punchy at its loudness. Two good targets:

• Loud, about −8.5 LUFS in the loud parts: as loud as current releases. Best when your music is also played on SoundCloud, by DJs or in clubs.
• Streaming, about −11 LUFS in the loud parts: keeps more punch and peak room. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube turn loud songs down to around −14 anyway.

Those are the two loudness options of MakeItSoundPro. Every song is mastered three ways (Gentle, Balanced and Bold) at the loudness you choose, and you can compare them with your original at the same level, so you hear what changed rather than just more volume.

True peak: why −1 dBTP

Streaming services encode your WAV into a lossy format (Ogg, AAC or Opus). Encoding can raise the peaks slightly, and peaks over 0 dBFS distort on playback. True peak (dBTP) measures the real peak between the samples, which is what matters here. Spotify recommends −1 dBTP, or −2 dBTP for very loud masters.

Many commercial masters peak higher than that and sound fine, because 256 kbps AAC and high-quality Ogg add very little. If you’re unsure, −1 dBTP is the safe choice: it’s what our Streaming masters use. Loud masters stop at −0.3 dBTP, which stayed clean in our encoding tests.

LUFS in one minute

• Integrated LUFS is the loudness of the whole song, quiet intro included. Streaming services normalise this value.
• Short-term LUFS is the loudness over the last three seconds. The loudest stretches, your chorus or drop, show how loud the song really feels.
• True peak (dBTP) is the highest level between samples, after conversion back to sound.
• PSR (peak to short-term loudness) shows the punch left in a master: below about 6 dB it starts to sound squashed.

Checklist before you upload

1. Export a 24-bit WAV at your song’s sample rate, not an MP3.
2. Keep true peaks at −1 dBTP or slightly below (−0.3 dBTP at the most).
3. Trim silence: more than about 5 seconds at the start or end can be rejected.
4. Check it in mono: out-of-phase parts disappear on phones and smart speakers.
5. Listen on a phone and in a car, not only on studio monitors.
6. Set your distributor’s preview start to your chorus or drop, for TikTok and Apple Music previews.

MakeItSoundPro checks loudness, true peaks, mono and silence on every master, and lets you listen on a simulated phone, laptop, earbuds, car or club system before you download.

Questions