FabFilter User Forum
Mastering for Spotify -14 LUFS?
If you master something for spotify should you be aiming for -14LUFS or do you just master to as high as you can and let them make it lower on upload?
HD — Sep 30, 2022
If you master something for spotify should you be aiming for -14LUFS or do you just master to as high as you can and let them make it lower on upload?
Opinions vary on this, especially across genres. What I see in the electronic, pop, and hip-hop/trap worlds is that songs are generally mastered as loud as they can be while still sounding good (still avoiding annoying harsh distortion), which in those genres usually means the loudest parts of the songs are around -8LUFS to -6LUFS Short Term, which is extremely loud. Of course those songs have quieter parts, so if you measure the Long Term LUFS of the entire song its lower than -6LUFS. This includes most professionally released tracks in those genres, even the copies distributed to Spotify, and you can hear their loudness when you disable Spotify's loudness normalization feature(s).
To get a master that loud though, the mix and arrangement has to be very good and almost done with loudness in mind from the beginning of the arrangement process.