What LUFS Should You Master To? A Practical Look at Loudness for Streaming

While remastering some old tracks, I got curious about where the loudness war in dance music stands these days, and what LUFS level people are actually mastering to now — so I looked into it.

For Major Streaming Services, -14 LUFS Is a Safe Mastering Target

(The tweet below is in Japanese — it links to a two-part note.com article about the loudness war that I found while researching this.)

Diving deep into the internet, I found the note.com article linked above. It’s a two-part piece and a must-read — both halves are clear and easy to follow. Reading it, I learned that if you’re mainly thinking about major streaming services, -14 LUFS (Loudness Unit, referenced to Full Scale) is a reasonable mastering target. That said, if you’re using an aggregator to distribute to a wide range of music services like I am, it’s not that simple — not every platform supports loudness normalization (since a single master file gets registered with each service). For example, if a download store you distribute to doesn’t use loudness normalization, a DJ who buys the track might find it plays quieter than other tracks at a club, and it won’t hit as hard on the dancefloor (I wonder if something like Native Instruments’ Traktor has a built-in feature to level out loudness automatically?).

What Are Other Musicians Doing?

Let’s take a different angle here and look at what other musicians are actually doing.

Takkyu Ishino had just wrapped up four consecutive weeks of releases, and I measured the LUFS of one of my favorites, Turkish Smile. Beyond just liking the track, part of why I picked it is that it’s distributed via Sony Music (a Spotify shareholder), so I figured they might have a direct-publishing account rather than going through an aggregator the way I do.

Above is a screenshot from the actual measurement. The measured value came out to roughly -11 LUFS. I’d assumed it would be optimized to -14 LUFS, so the result surprised me. This gave me one more data point to go on.

So What LUFS Should You Actually Use?

If you’re using a distribution aggregator like I am, here’s how I’d frame the options:

1. Go with roughly -11 LUFS and follow the example above
2. Match the note.com author’s ~-10 LUFS ± 2 LUFS and see how it goes
3. Go with -14 LUFS and wait for loudness normalization to become the norm
4. Loudness is Justice! Slam it at -9 LUFS

In practice, I think options 1 and 2 can be treated as roughly the same. Option 3 is probably the safest, but since loudness normalization is still in a transitional phase, it’s hard to say how things will shake out — even if you calibrate to that standard today, there’s no telling when the standard itself might shift. That said, I’m personally not a fan of forcing loudness and over-compressing things either, so I landed on roughly -11 LUFS being the right call for now.
Personally, I hope that as streaming services keep growing, loudness normalization becomes the standard, putting an end to this loudness war and letting dynamics come back to life.

Update — 2024.05.08

After running with -11 LUFS for a while, I had some further thoughts worth adding.
For streaming, I still think this loudness level works fine — but when playing on proper club sound systems, tracks mastered this way come out quieter than other download-sourced tracks. If you push the gain up to match perceived loudness, it can hit the mixer’s peak and become hard to balance against other tracks.
Because of this, I’ve come to think it’s better, where possible, to give listeners or buyers control over the loudness themselves, or to provide separate guidance per format.
For example, I now handle this by publishing a louder master specifically on Bandcamp, since it isn’t covered by my distribution aggregator.

Bonus

For this investigation, and for mastering in general, I use iZotope’s tools — mainly Neutron and Ozone. My tracks are mostly instrumental, so I don’t use Nectar. RX comes out occasionally when I need to clean up a mic recording.

There’s nothing to compare it against, so it might not be worth a listen, but I went ahead and uploaded a track remastered at -11 LUFS below.
It’s a remix of a track called Ocean Deep, from Technicolor — a 2007 album by XTAL and K404‘s duo project, Traks Boys. It never officially came out, but they were kind enough to give me their blessing and the stems directly.
It’s a good one for summer listening, so give it a spin if you’re up for it — download is available too.

Reference: What Is Loudness?

So what is loudness, exactly? Simply put, it’s how big a sound feels to the ear. For example, if you had two identical audio files of the same track and raised the loudness on one of them, playing both back at the same volume setting would make the louder one sound bigger.

Normally, when recording audio, the signal is kept from exceeding 0dB — the peaks of the loudest moments are kept under that ceiling. But within a recording, some sounds have a loud attack and a quiet sustain. Raising the loudness means processing that quiet part so it’s perceived as louder too.

In the past, most people did this by hand with EQ and compressors — a bit like carefully packing rice and side dishes into a bento box. In recent years, though, plugins called maximizers have made this much easier, letting people boost loudness with far less effort. It’s more like pressing ingredients and vinegared rice tightly into a mold for oshizushi (pressed sushi).