It’s happening. Spotify are switching to using LUFS for their loudness normalization. If you’re thinking ‘I thought they already used it', that’s understandable - but they didn’t.
They will in future though, and in this episode we talk about why the change matters, especially in the short-term. But also about when it doesn’t matter, and why it will hopefully matter even less as time goes on.
Topics include:
Why we don’t use Spotify
What we use instead, and why - and some of the differences
How normalization on Spotify used to work
How it’s going to work
What happens in the meantime
Why we mostly ignore the numbers, despite all this !
Links
TMS #73 – Are you having a LUF ? – more about LUFS
Qobuz – Lossless, high spec audio streaming service
Wikipedia page about MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoding - used by TIDAL
Spotify Begins the Move to LUFS Normalization - Ian’s blog post
TMS #67 – Minus 14 LUFS – or NOT ?
Hi Ian! So it's been some time since this episode was released, and I had some questions about this topic in 2023. I am new to mixing and mastering, and lately I have been coming across the same problems in my mixing and mastering processes. I finish mixing, and when I move on to the mastering stage, my song is not reaching the -0.3 limiter without adding around 9 dB of gain to it. It is always happening with some acoustic rock, folk, and indie types of songs, and when I add that much gain, it gets extremely loud. Then I decided to not make it hit the threshold and leave it with 4,5 dBs added, but it ended up getting 3,4 dB quieter than other songs on Spotify. It was a huge disappointment, and I thought the whole LUFS system was there to prevent this. I am listening to your podcasts hopelessly to fix my problem, but I am not able to find an answer. This had happened to me while mastering a sample pack the opposite way, too. The samples were already hitting above the threshold, and when I turned them down, they were getting too quiet. It's a problem with two sides, and I am not able to find the balance. Please, if you see this, could you make an episode about it? I would be so grateful. Thanks so much for all these valuable episodes. It's been eye-opening! Kind regards, Beliz.