How Loud Should My Master Be for Spotify?

Spotify and Apple Music normalise everything. A master hitting -6 LUFS gets turned down to sit alongside quieter tracks. But here's the thing, if you've got to -6 without sacrificing the dynamics, the low end, the transients, then even after normalisation your track will still sound louder and punchier than everything around it. The key is how you got there, not the number itself.

A bad loud master crushes everything to hit a number. A good loud master preserves the track and still gets there. After normalisation, the one that kept its dynamics wins every time. There's a difference between perceived loudness and measured loudness, and a well-crafted master exploits that.

Beatport doesn't normalise. Neither does SoundCloud. If you're making music for DJs, loudness still matters in the traditional sense. A track at -12 LUFS will sound noticeably quieter in a DJ set than one at -7.

This is where I push harder. For club-focused releases, I'm getting the master as loud as I can without losing what makes the track work. The punch, the dynamics, the low-end weight. When those start to give, I stop.

I don't sit there watching a LUFS meter waiting for it to hit a specific number. I listen. Every track has a natural ceiling, a point where it starts to lose something. The kick softens, the depth flattens, the transients round off. That's where I stop.

A dense techno track might sit happily at -7 LUFS. A deep house record with lots of dynamics might sound best at -11. A vocal-led track might need something in between. The genre, the arrangement, the density of the production, they all affect where the sweet spot is.

The meter tells me roughly where I am. My ears tell me if I've gone too far.

Spotify turns it down. That's it. Your track doesn't get rejected or flagged. It just plays back at -14 LUFS like everything else. The question is what you gave up to get there.

If you crushed the dynamics, flattened the low end, and killed the transients just to hit a number, then yes, those don't come back when the volume drops. But if you got to -6 LUFS and the track still has punch, depth, and movement, it will sound louder and better than everything around it, even after normalisation. A good loud master beats a good quiet master every time. The problem was never loudness itself, it was bad loudness.

Too quiet is also a problem. Spotify will turn quiet masters up, but turning up a quiet master doesn't add punch or energy. It just makes it louder. If your master is sitting at -18 LUFS, it's probably not hitting hard enough for most genres.

There's a reason most professional masters land somewhere between -8 and -12 LUFS for dance music. That range gives you loudness, impact, and dynamics all at once.