Finagle My Song · Blog
How loud should my master be for Spotify? (The -14 LUFS myth)
A friend of mine spent months making tracks in Logic. Good songs. He sent them over and I listened — and immediately noticed something was off. Not the mix, not the arrangement. They just sounded... quiet. Thin. Like they were playing from the next room compared to everything else on the playlist.
He'd done what the internet told him. Master to -14 LUFS. That's Spotify's target, apparently.
That advice is wrong. Here's why.
What -14 LUFS actually means
Spotify normalises the loudness of every track it plays — the default target is around -14 LUFS integrated. The logic people follow is: "master to -14 and Spotify won't touch it." Sounds reasonable. It isn't.
Loudness normalisation adjusts volume. It doesn't adjust character.
A track mastered to -9 LUFS is dense, compressed, punchy — it's been through a limiter. When Spotify turns it down 5dB to hit its target, it still sounds dense and punchy. Just quieter. The character stays.
A track mastered to -14 has almost no limiting. It's dynamic and open. It sounds... dynamic and open. Great for acoustic folk. Not great if you want to sound competitive on a pop playlist next to tracks that went through a proper mastering chain.
What you're hearing when something sounds loud on Spotify isn't volume — it's density. Compression. Saturation. That doesn't disappear when the volume gets turned down.
My own mistake
My first album had songs all over the place loudness-wise. Some at -14, some at -10, some pushing -8. Transitions between tracks were jarring. Some felt weak next to others. Listeners noticed even if they couldn't name why.
The problem wasn't the volume. It was that I'd confused a normalisation target with a mastering target. They're not the same thing.
What to actually aim for
-9 to -11 LUFS is the competitive window for most genres.
- -11 LUFS — loud, streaming-ready, sounds competitive on any playlist
- -9 LUFS — as loud as you want to go before limiting starts costing you more than it gives back
- -14 LUFS — fine for acoustic, classical, anything where dynamics are genuinely the point
- Below -14 — your track may get a volume boost from Spotify depending on the listener's normalisation setting, but it'll still sound thin and underpowered compared to a properly mastered track at the same playback volume
Going harder than -9? You're fighting yourself. Spotify turns you back down, and the extra limiting you applied to get there just damaged your dynamics for nothing.
The real question
Not "what LUFS should I target?" but "what does this specific track need?"
A dense electronic track can live at -9 and still breathe. A live acoustic recording pushed to -9 will sound crushed. The target should come from the song — its dynamics, its genre, its character — not from a platform spec sheet.
That's actually the reason I built Finagle My Song. Upload your track and it analyses your specific LUFS, dynamic range, and true peaks — then recommends a target that makes sense for that song, not a blanket number. Free, no account needed.
But even without that: stop targeting -14 unless you're deliberately making something quiet. Your masters will sound a lot better for it.