Loudness Standards and You!

When you are uploading your tracks to consumer sites like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, you are sending your audio/video through what is called Loudness Normalization. It was integrated into streaming services to help automatically process and adjust the perceived loudness of ALL songs/videos to sound the exact same- no matter what it does to your product!

This is why a lot of care must be undertaken when uploading/mastering your products before they go online to these streaming services. Each platform has its own playback service and super algorithms that will either turn down or turn up your product in order to gain a more level loudness perception from video to video or song to song.

Spotify in particular can sometimes use peak limiting to bring up the loudness of your track! If you have mastered your track as loud as you can, the chance of you losing some punch in your transients or dynamic range of your track is high. The loudness maximization also aims to reduce the dynamic range of the music so as the average level of it can be made higher (TuneCore, 2018). Distortion, over compression, EQ's etc all stand to be potential problems if mastering of your project has not been catered to the specific platform of your release.

Below are suggested LUFS levels to master your project to. LUFS stands for 'Loudness Unit Full Scale'.

These are examples of what loudness normalization can do to your project in transient form on Spotify- loss of dynamic range and over compression-

Taking into account your mix/master levels before the completion of your project is incredibly important. Not catering towards them can prove very damaging to the audio/visual you have created and sound somewhat unprofessional; especially if you were paid to produce a high quality product! Do not let the perceived loudness of your project be entirely directed by a robot. Planning for the release stage of your product will only enhance your chances of getting further work or industry recognition.

References-

TuneCore. (2018). Music Streaming Platforms & Mastering - 3 Guiding Concepts - TuneCore. [online] Available at: https://www.tunecore.com/blog/2017/03/music-streaming-platforms-mastering-3-guiding-concepts.html

Mastering The Mix. (2018). Mixing and Mastering Using LUFS. [online] Available at: https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/mixing-and-mastering-using-lufs

Mastering The Mix. (2018). Mastering audio for Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify and Youtube. [online] Available at: https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/76296773-mastering-audio-for-soundcloud-itunes-spotify-and-youtube