Loudness targets for Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
What LUFS to master to, what every streaming service does to a record that arrives louder, and the true-peak ceiling to leave under it.
Every streaming service normalises playback: it measures how loud a record is and turns it down to land near its own number. So mastering louder than the target doesn't make you louder on Spotify. It makes you quieter and squashed — you keep every dynamic you spent, and the service takes back the level you bought with them.
The targets
These are the four the analyser measures against, and the numbers it uses. Loudness is integrated LUFS across the whole track; the ceiling is true peak, not sample peak.
| Target | Loudness | Ceiling | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Streaming | -14 LUFS | -1 dBTP | Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube all turn everything down to about here anyway. Master louder than this and they just turn you down — you keep the squash and lose the dynamics. |
| Club / loud | -9 LUFS | -1 dBTP | For DJ sets and anything that has to hold up next to a commercial dance master. Loud costs dynamics; spend it on purpose. |
| Dynamic | -18 LUFS | -1 dBTP | Jazz, classical, folk, anything you want to breathe. The quiet bits stay quiet and the loud bits still mean something. |
| Reference / rough | -16 LUFS | -3 dBTP | A safe level for sending a mix to someone else to work on. Leaves the mastering headroom intact. |
Why the ceiling isn't 0
A digital file stores samples, but a converter plays the curve drawn through them — and between two samples that curve goes higher than either. That's true peak. A master that reads 0.0 dBFS on a sample meter can be well over 0 on playback, and a phone or a cheap DAC clips on the overshoot. Leaving a decibel under the ceiling costs nothing audible and removes the whole problem. More on true-peak limiting.
Where a mix should sit before mastering
About -18 LUFS — roughly where a mix lands when it's been left alone and nothing has been pushed. It matters because every threshold in a mastering chain is an absolute number: the same compressor setting on a mix that arrives 12 dB quiet is a compressor that never opens. More on gain staging.
Read next
Gain staging, and riding a level
Why a master starts by putting every mix at the same level — about -18 LUFS — and what to do about a verse that came in under its chorus.
Program EQ, and the boost-and-cut trick
Broad, musical curves instead of surgical cuts — and the one move, boosting and attenuating the same low band, that fixes more muddy mixes than anything else.
Optical compression: the slow one
What a photocell does to timing, why an opto can hold a whole mix steady without anyone hearing it, and when to reach for one instead of a faster compressor.
Bus compression, and where “glue” comes from
The fast VCA that makes a mix sound like one performance rather than a stack of tracks — ratio, attack, release, and the sidechain filter that keeps the bass out of it.