Sometime around May 20th, Spotify finally lowered its volume normalization to approximately -14LUfs, -3dB lower than their previous level and generally matching the levels of TIDAL and YouTube. This is big news. Spotify was the last holdout, extending the loudness wars by being 3dB louder than other streaming services, pressuring musicians, labels and mastering engineers to make needlessly hot masters to compete loudness-wise, even if it didn't suit the style of music. With this move Spotify, TIDAL and YouTube now use playback reference levels within a dB of each other, with Pandora, ReplayGain and Apple Sound Check being -2dB lower at -16LUfs, exactly conforming to the recommendations of the Audio Engineering Society for streaming loudness.
This means there is no longer any pressure to make hotter masters to compete volume-wise on Spotify, or any other streaming service; you can now have your mastering engineer create masters at an average integrated loudness of -14LUfs and it will work perfectly across all streaming services. (YouTube is actually +1dB hotter at -13LUfs, so if max loudness on YouTube is important to you, you might push everything to -13LUfs, knowing that Spotify, Tidal and others will turn it down a dB. But if your music is fairly dynamic that extra dB really won't make a difference, and 1dB less limiting will certainly make a difference!)
Even though the -14LUfs level is still 2dB hotter than the AES recommendation, this is a HUGE step forward, allowing an extra 3dB of peak-to-average headroom compared to Spotify's previous level, and a whopping 6dB improvement over the most ridiculously loud CD's.
The Good News and the Bad News
The good news is that with the death of CD and now with the willingness of streaming services and media players to comply, at least within a couple dB, with the loudness guidelines set by the AES, there is now no need to push volumes on your production in order to be competitive with other music. The result will be much more open, punchy, expressive music, and music more pleasant to listen to without all of the distortion and artifacts caused by hyper-limiting. These new levels are essentially the same as when music was mastered for vinyl, and that's one of the reasons people love the sound of vinyl from the 50's through the early 90's. It's partly the analog sound of the record and the cartridge, but a huge part of it is that the clarity, emotion and punch of the music was not destroyed by being over mastered.
The bad news is, all of the music that has been ruined since the first stupid-loud CD came out in 1995, and everyone else jumped off the cliff right behind it to be competitive in the loudness wars, will still sound just as awful compared to newer, more dynamic productions. All that will happen to it is it will be turned down to the normalized loudness of the steaming service or media player, so it will no longer be louder than other songs, but all the damage done to that music to make it loud will still be there.
For over 22 years, the answer to "Why does that music pop when it comes up on the CD changer?" has been "Because it's louder than the others". Now the answer to the new question of "Why does that music pop on Spotify/TIDAL/iTunes?" is "Because it's more dynamic than the others". This is a great day!
There is one group that will be big losers in this, and that is the plethora of people claiming to be "mastering engineers", along with mix engineers who tell you they can also master, but who know nothing of mastering other than to make it loud. The art of mastering, the actual sweetening process, will once again be what mastering is all about. Does the person mastering your music even know what Integrated, Max Momentary and Max Short Term loudness is? Does he have the meters to measure this? Does he understand the important interaction of those? Does he know what True Peak means, and does he even have a True Peak limiter? Does he know how to master at proper True Peak levels so data-compressed formats don't distort? Does he understand crest factors so that your music does not needlessly get turned down on streaming services even though your integrated loudness is correct? At DES Mastering we have been on top of this since around 2011 when the new loudness measuring methods were being developed, and attended the original AES seminars and workshops that helped established the new standards for broadcast and streaming loudness. And we have the tools and the knowledge to create masters for you that will take full advantage of this breakthrough in sound quality!
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