The Mastering Show #52 - DON'T aim for LUFS targets online

All the online streaming services play music back at roughly -14 LUFS, so that’s the level we should aim for when we’re mastering, right ? Wrong. That may sound strange, given how much we’ve talked about online loudness over the years - but we’re serious. In this show we dive deeper into one of the points we discussed in the last show: why you shouldn't be aiming for specific integrated LUFS values when mastering you music for online streaming. But, why it is still useful to know how your music will be affected. Topics we cover include: * A quick introduction to normalization * How it works * Why peak normalisation is useless for matching loudness * Why mastering songs to a specific LUFS value doesn’t work * So why are LUFS measurements of streaming services useful AT ALL ? * When Spotify’s normalization fails * The biggest problem with normalization right now Full show notes and links at http://themasteringshow.com/episode-52