How Loud To Master A Song For Streaming?

This is a SUPER confusing topic for many, and I hope this article sets the record straight.

Music Distributors and the Loudness War

If you search the internet, you will find lots of conflicting information about how loud your songs should be before you send them off to a distributor like CD Baby, Tunecore, Distrokid, etc. The distributors suggest leaving about 1 dB of headroom on your final masters to give some space for transcoding errors that will occur when you convert your pristine lossless master to data compressed and lossy file formats like MP3 and AAC that are much more stream friendly. Without this extra headroom, your music may have what’s called “intersample peaks”. Whether or not you can hear them and if intersample peaks are really a problem are discussed more in the video.

So that all makes sense. The distributors (CD Baby, Tunecore, Distrokid, etc.) don’t really care what the loudness of your music is, they just want to be sure that the files don’t sound like crap when converted for streaming.

What About Streaming Services and Music Loudness (Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, Apple Music)

To make things even more complicated, the different streaming services give recommendations for song loudness when submitting music through the distributor. Some say you should send songs at -16 LUFS others say -14 LUFS. Some don’t even care about the loudness of your music.

The reason they want the average level so quiet is they can turn it down automatically for the listener to improve the listening experience. That way you aren’t always reaching for the volume knob between songs.

But if you submit a song to a streaming service that quiet, the song often will lack cohesion and not be competitive songs in the genre (at least for more modern radio friendly genres – this isn’t the case for highly dynamic music like classical).

To add to the complexity, the streaming services can change their views on playback volumes over time (like Spotify) and others don’t have the volume adjustment feature enabled by default – which would make your song sound really bad if it was mastered to -14 LUFS. It just simply wouldn’t sound competitive compared to the other songs.

As of right now, there isn’t a way to send different masters to your distributor and music streaming service.

This means we are stuck with ONE song “version” and loudness to submit.

So how loud should you master your songs for streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and YouTube?

It’s a complicated question, but hopefully the video below breaks it down and provides some perspective on what the biggest mastering engineers are doing, and what you can do to make sure your songs sound the best when distributed to streaming platforms.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
0:45 Some Suggested Levels for Mastering
0:59 Why is there so much confusion?
1:55 Streaming Platform Requirements
2:23 Penalties For Loudness
3:01 Why did this all happen?
3:53 So how loud should my song be?
4:52 WHY SHOULD I LISTEN TO YOU?!?
5:59 Mastering DOESN’T MAKE A SONG LOUD
6:54 BONUS: Free Download

 

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