Loudness Analysis: Mastering for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube

The Loudness War Is Over — And the Platforms Won

For most of recording history, mastering engineers competed to make their masters louder than everyone else's. The assumption was that louder sounds better — and in a physical retail context where tracks were played individually, that was partially true.

The streaming era ended this arms race. When every track on a platform is normalised to the same perceived loudness target, there's no advantage to over-compressing your master. In fact, pushing loudness beyond the platform's target actively hurts you — your track gets turned down and sounds over-compressed relative to others.

Understanding platform loudness standards is now a fundamental requirement of professional mastering.

The Technical Standards

LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale) is the standard measurement unit for streaming loudness. It measures integrated loudness over the full duration of a track, accounting for human perception of loudness in a way that simple peak metering does not.

Platform targets:

• Spotify: -14 LUFS integrated, -1 dBTP true peak
• Apple Music: -16 LUFS integrated, -1 dBTP true peak
• YouTube: -14 LUFS integrated, -1 dBTP true peak (with louder normalisation to -13 for some content)
• Amazon Music: -14 LUFS integrated
• Tidal: -14 LUFS integrated
• SoundCloud: -14 LUFS integrated (recommended)

True Peak (dBTP) measures the peak level including inter-sample peaks — distortion that occurs between the digital samples when audio is converted to analogue. Keeping true peak below -1 dBTP prevents distortion in the conversion process.

Genre Considerations

Loudness targets interact differently with different genres:

• Electronic music, hip hop, pop: These genres typically master to -8 to -10 LUFS. The platform normalises them down to -14, which is fine — the DR (dynamic range) is low and the normalisation doesn't cause audible artefacts.
• Rock and indie: Typically -11 to -14 LUFS. The platform normalisation has minimal impact.
• Classical, jazz, acoustic: These genres benefit from more dynamic range (-18 to -14 LUFS). The wider dynamics are part of the listening experience.

Checking Your Loudness

SongTools.ai's Loudness Analysis tool processes your audio file and returns:

• Integrated LUFS (the streaming target measurement)
• Short-term LUFS variations (useful for identifying dynamics issues within the track)
• True peak level
• Dynamic range (DR)

If your track is significantly louder than -14 LUFS integrated, it will be turned down by streaming platforms. If it's at or below -14, it will play at or near its original level. Understanding where your master sits before distribution lets you make adjustments before the platforms make them for you.

The Mastering Decision

The correct LUFS target for your master depends on your genre and the quality of your limiting and compression. The goal is to achieve the maximum perceived energy at the platform's normalisation target — which means using the full dynamic range available within your genre's conventions rather than brute-force limiting.

Work with a mastering engineer (or a high-quality AI mastering service) who understands streaming loudness standards. The days of "as loud as possible" are definitively over.