How loud should a master be in 2021 (with free VST plugin)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to integrate and expand our article about Mastering levels for streaming, cd and club play (click here to read it) updating it to the latest requirements and tools.

Levels in mastering are an evolving thing, it's something that has been changing through time with the evolution of the supports, and any mastering engineer needs to be up to date with the industry standard requirements, if he/she wants to nail the perfect levels.

Let's start by saying that times are changed from when we were talking about the Loudness war (click here for a dedicated article), a time in which everyone was competing in having the loudest (and often distorted) master, and the answer to that has been the fact that the main streaming platforms (Youtube, Spotify, Apple music and so on) apply a sort of normalization to the track to make them sound coherent, with the result that oversquashed masters gets a big penalty in terms of db.

In short: the louder (and less dynamic) your master is, the more db the platform will subtract to make it sound quieter; you can see how many db your master will be reduced by uploading it in this page: 

Loudness Penalty

The page will analyze for free your master and tell you with good approximation how many db will be reduced in all the main streaming platforms.

In order to reach the correct levels for the modern times the best approach is to check out the streaming platforms help section and read the suggested levels, in this case we are going to check out the Spotify ones:
they suggest -14db of Integrated LUFS (integrated means average, not peak) and -1db of True peak (-2db in case of a master louder than -14db of Integrated LUFS).
You can of course upload hotter masters, they will just be reduced in volume, so that they will sound at the same volume of the other songs, but more compressed and distorted.

LUFS are loudness units full scale, which is a modern value used to calculate the perceived loudness, and it's used mainly in streaming platforms, while True peak is the maximum absolute level of the signal waveform, and both values needs to be monitored after the limiter, since even if you put -1db of ceiling, the true peak can be louder, for example -0.3db in reality.

How to measure those values for free? With Youlean Loudness Meter plugin, a free Vst that does exactly that (and monitors also the dynamic range!), and based on that you can export your songs to make them sound the best they can be in every platform.

Happy holidays from Guitar Nerding Blog!! 

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