How Loud Should You Master Your Music?

A huge part of music creation is deciding how loud a song should be so that it sounds good and it competes with other music. Over time there have been different metering methods that we have used to measure loudness and some of those include peak signal, RMS, & LUFS just to name a few.

For a while now, LUFS has been regarded as the best way out of the bunch for measuring loudness and I'm sure at some point you've even heard that -14LUFS is the target loudness for streaming platforms and that's personally what I've been us using for a while.

The other day, however, I was browsing the web doing some research and I came across an article by Ian Shepherd. Now, if you don't know who Ian is then you should because not only is he a great mastering engineer but he also runs ProductionAdvice.co.uk which a great resource for anyone in our industry.

The article that I came across discussed how LUFS is not the best way to master your music so immediately I was hooked. To summarize, Ian talks about how although LUFS is a great reference tool, there are 3 problems. Number 1 is that not all streaming platforms use LUFS as a reference. In fact, out of all the streaming platforms, only Tidal uses LUFS. Number 2, is that integrated loudness isn't always the best method for measuring everything. The reason is that different genres have different dynamics so a rock song, for example, might hover consistently at -14LUFs while a more mellow song with soft intros and interludes might hover at -16LUFs even though they both might sound when balanced by ear. Finally, he describes how loudness is, in fact, an artistic decision and instead of just looking at numbers you should go off of what sounds best.

Now you might be saying yea yea that's great but I would still like a ballpark number to base my masters off of. Well lucky for us Ian gives us that as well.

If you must use LUFS, he suggests that you should master your recording to no more than -9LUFS at the loudest parts, and then balance everything else around them musically.

Now LUFS is still great but if you want something more effective, then Ian suggests using a tool like Loudness Penalty. Loudness Penalty is a plugin developed by MeterPlugs alongside Ian and the goal is simple, to understand how your music will sound in different streaming platforms and whether or not those platforms will turn up or turn down your music. The idea of such a plugin was beyond intriguing for me so I hit up the good people at Plugin Boutique who were kind enough to send me a copy to review.

The interface of the plugin is really simple. You essentially get a visual layout of all the major streaming platforms and once you play your music it will give you a reading represented by either a negative or positive number. If the number is positive that means that that specific streaming platform will turn up your music by the number shown so for example if you see +2 it will be turned up by 2 decibels. It works the same way with negative numbers.

The idea is to focus on a streaming platform that you like and adjust your master accordingly. What Ian recommends you do, however, is raise the volume of your music until you get a reading of around -2 for YouTube. The reason for this is because not all platforms will turn up your music, YouTube being a prime example, but they will all definitely turn it down if it's too loud so Ian suggests you raise the volume until you get -2 on YouTube and then once you upload it let all the platforms turn it down to their desired levels.

Watch the video above for a demo of how the plugin work.

Now, as great as this plugin is, the best part is that it's also free-ish. The plugin itself is $50 and that's not too terrible but if you don't want to spend any money they also have a website companion that does the same thing as the plugin. Essentially you upload the song and it works the same way as the plugin. Personally, I prefer the plugin because that way I can integrate it into my mixing template and see everything in one screen but this way at least you have options.