How loud should your master be?

You finish a track, you are proud of it, you queue it up on Spotify next to a song you love, and your one sounds quieter and smaller. It is a deflating moment, and almost everyone who makes music hits it. The instinct is to crank the loudness until it matches. But loudness on streaming does not work the way it used to. It is measured in LUFS now, not just peaks, and the platforms have their own ideas about how loud your track gets to be. Here is what is actually going on, and the level you should be aiming for.

What LUFS actually means

LUFS stands for Loudness Units Full Scale, and it is a measurement of perceived volume, how loud something actually sounds to a human ear over time, rather than how high a single peak spikes. The number you care about is integrated LUFS: the average loudness across the whole track from start to finish. A higher LUFS reading (closer to zero) means a louder-sounding track. A quiet acoustic piece might sit around -18 LUFS, while a squashed modern pop record might read -8. Peaks tell you almost nothing about how loud a song feels. LUFS does, which is exactly why every streaming service now uses it to decide playback levels.

The streaming targets

Each platform normalises playback to its own loudness target. Aim for these integrated LUFS values:

• Spotify: around -14 LUFS
• Apple Music: around -16 LUFS
• YouTube: around -14 LUFS
• Tidal: around -14 LUFS
• Amazon Music: around -14 LUFS

Here is the part that trips people up. These services NORMALISE. If your master is louder than the target, the platform turns it down to hit that number. So mastering to -6 LUFS does not make you louder on Spotify, it just gets turned down to -14 like everything else, and now you have paid for that loudness with crushed dynamics and added distortion for no benefit at all. You end up sounding worse than the track you were trying to beat.

The exception is anywhere that does not normalise. Clubs, Beatport, DJ download stores and plain file downloads play your master at its actual level. That is why dance music is mastered louder for those contexts, usually around -8 to -10 LUFS, so it hits hard on a big system and sits next to other club-ready tracks. Match the loudness to where the music will be heard.

Why louder is not better

For about two decades the industry fought the loudness war, pushing masters louder and louder so they would jump out on the radio or next to other CDs. The casualty was dynamics. When you squash a track to make the quiet parts as loud as the loud parts, you flatten the life out of it. Drums stop punching, the mix stops breathing, and it gets tiring to listen to. Loudness normalisation basically ended that war. Since every loud track gets turned down to the same target anyway, all that aggressive limiting buys you nothing on streaming. You keep the distortion and the squashed dynamics and you throw away the punch. Quieter, more dynamic masters often sound bigger after normalisation, because the loud moments still have somewhere to go.

True peak: leave headroom

Keep your true peak under -1 dBTP. True peak measures the real level of the waveform between samples, not just at the sample points, and those inter-sample peaks matter once your track gets encoded. When a song is converted to a lossy format like MP3 or AAC for streaming, the encoding can push peaks above 0 dB and clip, which adds nasty digital distortion you never heard in your DAW. Leaving about 1 dB of headroom gives the encoder room to work and keeps your master clean wherever it ends up. It costs you almost nothing in loudness and saves you from an ugly surprise.

Match loudness to the genre

There is no single right number, because different music wants different energy. Dance and electronic music can sit loud, around -8 to -10 for club and download use, because the genre lives on relentless power. Acoustic, ambient and singer-songwriter material should stay quieter and more dynamic, often -16 LUFS or softer, so the intimacy survives. Pop, hip-hop and rock usually land somewhere in the middle. Push too loud for a gentle song and you crush the very thing that makes it work. Let a club track sit too quiet and it feels limp next to its peers. The genre tells you the target.

How to hit the right level

You have three practical options. The first is to use a LUFS meter, a free one is fine, and watch the integrated reading while you set your limiter so you land near your target. The second is to reference a commercial track in your genre that you think sounds great, drop it into your session, and match the feel of it by ear and by meter. The third, if you would rather not wrestle with metering at all, is to use an automated master that sets a streaming-safe loudness and handles the true peak for you. Any of these beats guessing and hoping.

The short version: stop chasing the loudness war. Pick a sensible target for where your music will live, keep your true peak below -1 dBTP, and let the dynamics breathe. A track that is set right sounds bigger on streaming than one that is just squashed, every time.