If you are relatively new to making music then you'll probably be familiar with this story.
You stumbled your way around mixing something that sounds more or less like music (not before having watched countless youtube tutorials in which you learned many terrible rules of thumb). And at the end of this process you are left wondering: How loud should my music be in order to release it?
You want a number. WHAT'S THE NUMBER you cry at the sky in a Shakespearean pose while holding a human skull in your hand to accentuate the drama.
And I'm here to tell you that's the wrong question to ask, but by now you already looked up an answer to your question and you've been given a number: -14 LUFS.
You breathe a sigh of relief, you've been given a number in no uncertain terms. You know numbers, they are specific, there is no room for interpretation. Numbers are a warm safe blanket in which you can curl underneath of.
Mixing is much more complex and hard than you thought it would be, so you want ALL the numbers, all the settings being told to you right now so that your misery can end. You just wanted to make a stupid song and instead it feels like you are now sitting at a NASA control center staring at countless knobs and buttons and graphs and numbers that make little sense to you, and you get the feeling that if you screw this up the whole thing is going to be ruined. The stakes are high, you need the freaking numbers.
Yet now you submitted your -14 LUFS master to streaming platforms, ready to bask in all the glory of your first musical publication, and maybe you had the loudness normalization disabled, or you gave it a listen on Spotify's web player which has no support for loudness normalization. You are in shock: Compared to all the other pop hits your track is quiet AF. You panic.
You feel betrayed by the number, you thought the blanket was supposed to be safe. How could this be, even Spotify themselves recommend mastering to -14 LUFSi.
The cold truth
Here is the cold truth: -14 LUFS is quiet. Most commercial releases of rock, pop, hip hop, edm, are louder than that and they have been louder than that for over 20 years of digital audio, long before streaming platforms came into the picture.
The Examples
Let's start with some hand-picked examples from different eras, different genres, ordered by quietest to loudest.
LUFSi = LUFS integrated, meaning measured across the full lenght of the music, which is how streaming platforms measure the loudness of songs.
- Jain - Makeba (Album Version, 2015) = -13.2 LUFSi
- R.E.M. - At My Most Beautiful (1998) = -12.2 LUFSi
- Massive Attack - Pray for Rain (2010) = -11.4 LUFSi
- Peter Gabriel - Growing Up (2002) = -10.5 LUFSi
- Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood (2001) = -10.1 LUFSi
- Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - In Motion (2010) = -10.0 LUFSi
- Zero 7 - Mr. McGee (2009) = -9.8 LUFSi
- If The World Should End in Fire (2003) = -9.1 LUFSi
- Taylor Swift - Last Christmas (2007) = -8.6 LUFSi
- Madonna - Ghosttown (2015) = -8.6 LUFSi
- Björk - Hunter (1997) = -8.6 LUFSi
- Red Hot Chili Peppers - Black Summer (2022) = -8.1 LUFSi
- The Black Keys - Lonely Boy = -7.97 LUFSi
- Junun - Junun (2015) = -7.9 LUFSi
- Coldplay - My Universe (2021) = -7.8 LUFSi
- Wolfmother - Back Round (2009) = -7.7 LUFSi
- Taylor Swift - New Romantics (2014) = -7.6 LUFSi
- Paul McCartney - Fine Line (2005) = -7.5 LUFSi
- Taylor Swift - You Need To Calm Down (2019) = -7.4 LUFSi
- Doja Cat - Woman (2021) = -7.4 LUFSi
- Ariana Grande - Positions (2021) = -7.3 LUFSi
- Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - Immigrant Song (2012) = -6.7 LUFSi
- Radiohead - Bloom (2011) = -6.4 LUFSi
- Dua Lipa - Levitating (2020) = -5.7 LUFSi
Billboard Year-End Charts Hot 100 Songs of 2023
- Last Night - Morgan Wallen = -8.2 LUFSi
- Flowers - Miley Cyrus = -7.2 LUFSi
- Kill Bill - SZA = -7.4 LUFSi
- Anti-Hero - Taylor Swift = -8.6 LUFSi
- Creepin' - Metro Boomin, The Weeknd & 21 Savage = -6.9 LUFSi
- Calm Down - Rema & Selena Gomez = -7.9 LUFSi
- Die For You - The Weeknd & Ariana Grande = -8.0 LUFSi
- Fast Car - Luke Combs = -8.6 LUFSi
- Snooze - SZA = -9.4 LUFSi
- I'm Good (Blue) - David Guetta & Bebe Rexha = -6.5 LUFSi
So are masters at -14 LUFSi or quieter BAD?
NO. There is nothing inherently good or bad about either quiet or loud, it all depends on what you are going for, how much you care about dynamics, what's generally expected of the kind of music you are working on and whether that matters to you at all.
For example, by far most of classical music is below -14 LUFSi. Because they care about dynamics more than anyone else. Classical music is the best example of the greatest dynamics in music ever. Dynamics are 100% baked into the composition and completely present in the performance as well.
Some examples:
Complete Mozart Trios (Trio of piano, violin and cello)
Album • Daniel Barenboim, Kian Soltani & Michael Barenboim • 2019
Tracks range from -22.51 LUFSi to -17.22 LUFSi.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 "Choral" (Full symphony orchestra with sections of vocal soloists and choir)
Album • Wiener Philharmoniker & Andris Nelsons • 2019
Tracks range from -28.74 LUFSi to -14.87 LUFSi.
Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 38-41 (Full symphony orchestra)
Album • Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Sir Charles Mackerras • 2008
Tracks range from -22.22 LUFSi to -13.53 LUFSi.
On My New Piano (Solo piano)
Album • Daniel Barenboim • 2016
Tracks range from -30.75 LUFSi to -19.66 LUFSi.
Loudness normalization is for THE LISTENER
Before loudness normalization was adopted, you would put together a playlist on your streaming platform (or prior to that on your iPod or computer with mp3s), and there would often be some variation in level from song to song, especially if you had some older songs mixed in with some more modern ones, those jumps in level could be somewhat annoying.
Here comes loudness normalization. Taking a standard from European broadcasting, streaming platforms settled on the LUFS unit to normalize all tracks in a playlist by default, so that there are no big jumps in level from song to song. That's it! That's the entire reason why streaming platforms adopted LUFS and why now LUFS are a thing for music.
LUFS were invented in 2011, long after digital audio was a reality since the 80s. And again, they weren't made for music but for TV broadcasts (so that the people making commercials wouldn't crank up their levels to stand out).
And here we are now with people obsessing over the right LUFS just to publish a few songs.
There are NO penalties
One of the biggest culprits in the obsession with LUFS, is a little website called "loudness penalty" (not even gonna link to it, that evil URL is banned from this sub), in which you can upload a song and it would turn it down in the same way the different platforms would.
An innocent, good natured idea by mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, which backfired completely by leading inexperienced people to start panicking about the potential negative implications of incurring into a penalty due to having a master louder than -14 LUFSi.
Nothing wrong happens to your loud master, the platforms DO NOT apply dynamic range reduction (ie: compression). THEY DO NOT CHANGE YOUR SIGNAL.
The only thing they do, is what we described above, they adjust volume (which again, changes nothing to the signal) for the listener's convenience.
Why does my mix sound QUIETER when normalized?
One very important aspect of this happens when comparing your amateur production, to a professional production, level-matched: all the shortcomings of your mix are exposed. Not just the mix, but your production, your recording, your arrangement, your performance.
It all adds up to something that is perceived as standing out over your mix.
The second important aspect is that there can be a big difference between trying to achieve loudness at the end of your mix, vs maximizing the loudness of your mix from the ground up.
Integrated LUFS is a fairly accurate way to measure perceived loudness, as in perceived by humans. I don't know if you've noticed, but human hearing is far from being an objective sound level meter. Like all our senses (and the senses of all living things), they have evolved to maximize the chances of our survival, not for scientific measurements.
LUFS are pretty good at getting close to how we humans perceive loudness, but it's not perfect. That means that two different tracks could be at the same integrated LUFS and one of them is perceived to be bit louder than the other. Things like distortion, saturation, harmonic exciters, baked into a mix from the ground up, can help maximize a track for loudness (if that matters to you).
If it's all going to end up normalized to -14 LUFS eventually, shouldn't you just do it yourself?
If you've read everything here so far, you already know that LUFS are a relatively new thing, that digital audio in music has been around for much longer and that the music industry doesn't care at all about LUFS. And that absolutely nothing wrong happens to your mix when turned down due to loudness normalization.
That said, let's entertain this question, because it does come up.
The first incorrect assumption is that ALL streaming platforms normalize to -14 LUFSi. Apple Music, for instance, normalizes to -16 LUFSi. And of course, any platform could decide to change their normalization target at any time.
YouTube Music (both the apps and the music.youtube.com website) doesn't do loudness normalization at all.
The Spotify web player and third party players, don't do loudness normalization. So in all these places (plus any digital downloads like in Bandcamp), your -14 LUFSi master of a modern genre, would be comparatively much quieter than the rest.
SO, HOW LOUD THEN?
As loud or as quiet as you want! Some recommendations:
- Forget about LUFS and meters, and waveforms. It's completely normal for tracks in an album or EP to all measure different LUFS, and streaming platforms will respect the volume relationship between tracks when playing a full album/EP.
- Study professional references to hear how loud music similar to what you are mixing is.
- Learn to understand and judge loudness with nothing but your ears.
- Set a fixed monitoring level using a loud reference as the benchmark for what's the loudest you can tolerate, this includes all the gain stages that make up your monitoring's final level.
- If you are going to use a streaming platform, make sure to disable loudness normalization and set the volume to 100%.
The more time you spend listening to music with those fixed variables in place, the sooner digital audio loudness will just click for you without needing to look at numbers.
TLDR
- -14 LUFSi is quiet for modern genres, it has been since the late 90s, long before the LUFS unit was invented.
- All of modern music is louder than -14 LUFSi, often louder than -10 LUFSi.
- There are NO penalties for having a master louder than -14 LUFSi. Nothing bad is happening to your music.
- Loudness normalization is for the LISTENER. So don't worry about it.
- The mixes which you perceive as louder than yours when normalized, is likely a reaction to overall better mixes, better productions made by far more experienced people.
The long long coming (and requested) wiki article is finally here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mixingmastering/wiki/-14-lufs-is-quiet
