Here's the short version, and then I'll unpack it: -14 LUFS is Spotify's playback target, not your mastering target. Master the song to the loudness that serves the music, keep your true peak at or below -1 dBTP, and let normalisation do its job. That's it. If you stopped reading now you'd already be ahead of half the advice out there.
But knowing why that's the answer is what stops you second-guessing it at 1am the night before a release. So let's get into it.
What LUFS Actually Measures
LUFS — Loudness Units relative to Full Scale — is a measurement of perceived loudness. Unlike a peak meter, which just tells you the tallest spike in the waveform, LUFS is weighted to how human ears actually experience volume, averaged over time. Two tracks can have identical peak levels and wildly different LUFS readings, because one is dense and sustained while the other is punchy and dynamic.
The number you care about for streaming is integrated LUFS — the average across the whole track. When you see a platform target like "-14 LUFS," that's integrated loudness.
What Spotify Actually Does to Your Track
Spotify measures the loudness of your master and adjusts playback volume so everything on a listener's queue sits at a consistent level. By default, that level is -14 LUFS integrated. Users can change it: there's a Quiet mode (-19 LUFS), Normal (-14), and Loud (-11).
Here's the part that matters. If your master is louder than the target, Spotify simply turns the whole track down — clean gain reduction, no processing, no re-limiting. Your mix's internal balance is untouched; it just plays quieter. If your master is quieter than the target, Spotify turns it up only as far as the track's own headroom allows in Normal mode — and in Loud mode it will apply a limiter to close the gap.
Think about what that means for the "slam it to -8" approach. On a normalised platform, all that extra loudness gets thrown away at the volume knob — but the cost you paid for it stays. The crushed transients, the pumping, the fatigue: they're baked into the master. You traded punch for level, and then the level was taken away.
If you want to hear exactly what that trade sounds like, I've written about what over-compression does to a mix — the symptoms are the same ones I hear in over-limited masters every week.
The True Peak Trap
The one hard number I'd treat as non-negotiable for streaming is true peak: keep your master at or below -1 dBTP.
Here's why. Your WAV gets converted to lossy codecs for delivery — Ogg Vorbis and AAC in Spotify's case. Lossy encoding reconstructs the waveform, and that reconstruction can overshoot the original peaks. A master that touches 0 dBFS can clip after encoding, and that distortion happens on the platform's side where you can't hear it until it's live. A -1 dBTP ceiling gives the codec room to move. Make sure your limiter is actually reading true peak (inter-sample), not just sample peak — most modern limiters have the option.
So How Loud Should You Master?
As loud as the music wants to be. I know that sounds like a dodge, so here's the practical version of what it means.
Loudness in a genre isn't just level — it's an aesthetic. A heavy rock or metal master sits dense and saturated because that density is the sound. A dynamic folk or jazz record breathes because the space is the sound. When I master, I'm pushing the track until it has the density and impact its genre demands, and stopping before the transients start dying. For most contemporary rock and pop that lands somewhere well above -14 LUFS — and that's fine. Spotify turning your master down costs you nothing.
The honest workflow:
- Reference, don't calculate. Line up two or three commercial releases in your genre, level-matched, and compare density and punch — not numbers.
- Watch the transients, not the meter. The moment your kick and snare stop hitting, you've gone too far, whatever the LUFS readout says.
- Check the turn-down. Drop your master's playback level by however far it sits above -14 and compare it against your references at the same volume. That's what listeners will actually hear on Spotify.
- Cap true peak at -1 dBTP. The one rule that's actually a rule.
What About the Other Platforms?
The same logic holds everywhere, with different numbers. YouTube normalises to -14 LUFS but only turns down — it never boosts quiet content. Apple Music targets -16 LUFS with Sound Check. Tidal, Amazon, Deezer all sit in the same neighbourhood with their own quirks. You don't need a different master for each platform; you need one good master and a true-peak ceiling that survives encoding.
For the full platform-by-platform breakdown — targets, codecs, delivery specs, and the source documentation — use my free LUFS & Loudness Standards lookup. It covers every major streaming, broadcast, cinema, and gaming spec so you don't have to keep a spreadsheet of numbers that change every year.
The Bigger Picture
After 20 years of making records, here's what I've noticed: when someone's worried about hitting a LUFS number, the real problem is usually upstream. A mix with balanced low end, controlled dynamics, and honest transients gets loud easily — the master almost does itself. A mix that's fighting itself has to be crushed to compete, and no target number fixes that.
So if your masters only feel competitive when they're squashed, the answer probably isn't a different limiter setting. It's the mix — and that's a solvable problem.
If you're releasing something and want a master that competes without the crush — or a second opinion on a mix before it goes to mastering — that's what I do. And if you want to build the ear that makes these decisions yourself, that's what the course is for.