Why a louder master won't make your song louder on Spotify

The loudness war, and why streaming ended it

For years, mastering engineers pushed tracks louder and louder, because on radio and CDs the louder song often felt bigger. The cost was dynamics: the difference between soft and loud parts got squashed.

Streaming changed the rules. Platforms now normalise loudness, so every song in a playlist plays back at roughly the same level.

What Spotify actually does

Spotify measures each track's loudness in LUFS and adjusts it to -14 LUFS by default:

• A louder master gets turned down.
• A quieter master gets turned up, as long as there's headroom.
• Premium listeners can choose Loud (-11 LUFS), Normal (-14) or Quiet (-19).

So if your master is very loud, Spotify simply turns it down. You keep the squashed dynamics and lose the loudness you paid for.

What Spotify recommends

• Aim for around -14 LUFS integrated.
• Keep the true peak below -1 dBTP.
• If your master is louder than -14 LUFS, keep true peak below -2 dBTP, because lossy encoding can push peaks up.

What to tell your mixing engineer

You don't need to master exactly at -14. Some genres sit louder by design. But it's worth asking: "Are we making this loud because it sounds better, or because we think it'll be louder on Spotify?" If it's the second, it won't be.

Why this matters for marketing

Your song sits next to everyone else's on a playlist. A dynamic, well-balanced master that keeps its punch after normalisation will hold attention better than one that was crushed for loudness that doesn't exist on the platform.