Platforms normalize loudness: an over-compressed master simply gets turned down, and the lost dynamics never come back. Check your track — free.
| Platform | Target | What happens to your track |
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Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and TikTok bring every track to their own target loudness. A track louder than the target simply gets turned down — by exactly how much louder it is. Listeners will never hear it louder than the next song in the playlist.
This changes what the loudness war was about. A louder master used to win any comparison. After normalization there is nothing to win: loudness gets equalized, but the dynamics sacrificed for it do not come back. An over-compressed track plays at the same volume, only flatter.
Targets differ between platforms, so one master behaves differently on each. Spotify, YouTube and TikTok aim for roughly −14 LUFS, Apple Music for −16 LUFS, which is stricter. Deezer and Amazon Music sit near −15. True peak is recommended to stay at or below −1 dBTP everywhere: the headroom keeps the codec from clipping when encoding to AAC or Opus.
That is why a −8 LUFS club master loses 6 dB on streaming and sounds lifeless next to a track mastered at −14 with its dynamics intact.
The tool measures your file's integrated loudness per ITU-R BS.1770 and shows how many decibels each platform will turn it down. Zero means the track already matches the target. A negative value is how much it will be attenuated.
A small 1–2 dB penalty is normal and needs no rework. A 4–6 dB penalty means the master is over-compressed: the loudness gets removed anyway, and the squashed dynamics stay. That track is worth remixing with lighter compression.
Lower the master's target loudness and ease off the limiter. Aim for −14 LUFS instead of −9 and leave the peaks some headroom: after normalization the track will sound just as loud as the squashed one, but with transients intact — drums stay punchy instead of turning into clicks.
If the source mix is quiet, raise the level in the mix itself rather than pushing the mastering limiter: a limiter has no access to individual tracks and crushes everything at once.
Streaming platforms level every track to their target loudness (Spotify and YouTube ≈ −14 LUFS). If your master is louder, it simply gets turned down by the difference — that is the penalty. The loudness you compressed the track for disappears; the lost dynamics do not come back.
Once loudness is equalized, an over-compressed track plays at the same volume as a dynamic one but without transients or air: flat and tiring. What wins is not loudness but the quality of the dynamics.
14 LUFS integrated is a safe target for Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and most platforms; Apple Music is −16. Club genres are mastered louder deliberately, knowing the cost of normalization.