LUFS targets for Spotify, Apple Music and the club
Every producer eventually asks the same question: how loud should my master be? It depends on where it gets played — and the number matters less than most people think, except in one case where it matters a lot.
Streaming platforms turn your master down
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and the rest normalise playback loudness. They measure how loud your track is and adjust it so it sits at roughly the same level as everything around it. You cannot win a loudness war that the platform is actively refereeing.
At the time of writing, the published reference points look roughly like this:
- Spotify — around –14 LUFS integrated by default. The “Loud” setting sits near –11, “Quiet” near –19.
- Apple Music — around –16 LUFS with Sound Check enabled.
- YouTube — around –14 LUFS.
- Tidal and Amazon Music — also in the –14 LUFS region.
These figures move. Treat them as orientation and check each platform's current documentation before you make a decision that depends on the exact number.
What that means in practice
If you master to –6 LUFS for Spotify, Spotify turns it down by about 8 dB. Your track then plays at the same perceived level as everyone else's — but you have already spent your dynamic range getting there. The kick has less punch, the transients are gone, and the listener hears a flatter record at the same volume as the competition.
That is the whole argument against chasing loudness for streaming. Not that loud is bad — that you pay for it and get nothing back.
The club is a different job
Nothing normalises a USB stick in a CDJ. There is no loudness algorithm between your file and the mixer, and the track before yours was probably mastered loud. This is where the number genuinely matters.
Released techno and tech house masters commonly sit somewhere around –8 to –6 LUFS integrated. Whether that is right for your track depends on the arrangement — a sparse, dubby record tolerates far less limiting than a busy one.
If you release the same track to both, you have two sensible options: master once at club level and accept that streaming turns it down, or make two masters. Most people do the first. It is a defensible choice as long as you make it deliberately rather than by accident.
True peak matters more than the LUFS number
This is the part that actually breaks records, and it gets far less attention than loudness.
When a platform encodes your WAV to a lossy format, the decoded waveform does not match the original sample for sample. Peaks that sat exactly at 0 dBFS can come back above it, and that is where you get the crunchy, slightly broken top end people blame on “Spotify quality”.
Leave headroom. A true peak ceiling of –1 dBTP is the widely recommended figure and costs you nothing audible. If you are mastering loud for the club, it matters more, not less.
What the numbers look like on a finished master
A short checklist
- Decide where the track lives first. Club, streaming, or both.
- Set a true peak ceiling of –1 dBTP and leave it there.
- Judge the master against your mix at matched loudness. Louder always sounds better for the first ten seconds, which is exactly long enough to fool you.
- Check the integrated LUFS at the end, not the beginning. It is a result, not a target.
- If a number and your ears disagree, your ears win.
See where your track sits
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