New Spotify Normalization Revelations
Hello Fellow Audio Nerds,
After our last town hall (over 2 months ago) I had several people reach out to share their experiences, expertise, and even give me (under NDA) a behind the scenes look at what they are developing in terms of problem solving solutions for the great normalization problem.
While I cannot share much of what was given to me in confidence, I can share a couple of extremely helpful points that can serve as puzzle pieces to complete our very incomplete picture when it comes to the mysteries concerning normalization.
As some of you might remember, much of what spawned the idea of coming together as a community in the first place was an experience I had with an important major label project. On release day, the artist swore his album was “a dB quieter” than everyone else’s music. I rushed to capture and test the streaming level of the album, and found that the album as a whole was testing at an integrated LUFS of -15.5. The artist was right!
That was when I introduced the idea of crowd sourcing data to start to try to crack the code on why some albums are louder than others.
Through the Audio Accountability community I was introduced to a new friend at a well known software company who offered some help. After explaining to him the situation, he confirmed on his end that the album was indeed streaming at an integrated LUFS of -15.5 and was puzzled as well as to why that would be. In a user created playlist, any song from the album would play at the expected -14.0 Integrated LUFS. However, when playing the album as a whole the volume would drop.
He reached out to a contact at yet another software company for help - and that is where we found our answer.
It turns out, Spotify does not calculate the integrated loudness of an album as a whole. It takes the loudest song, and reduces the whole album so that the loudest song sits at -14.0. This is a very important revelation.
For instance, if you have an album that more or less sits around -10 LUFS, and you have one song that for whatever reason (ie. dense song that has no soft sections) is sitting hotter, say around -8 LUFS Spotify will take the whole album down -6dB to make the -8 LUFS song -14 LUFS. The rest of the album that was more or less sitting at -10 LUFS pre-normalization will now be playing back at -16 LUFS.
If you mastered an album as a whole and the album normalizes low - check to see if any particular track is much louder that the rest. If it makes sense musically, turn the loudest song down a touch and you’ll find that the album as a whole will normalize louder than before.
Say for instance, we take the previous example where one song was -8 LUFS and the rest were more or less -10 LUFS. The -8 LUFS song normalized to -14 LUFS and the rest to roughly -16 LUFS. If we were to take the -8 LUFS song and bring it down 1dB to -9 LUFS, it would result in a 1dB increase overall in the normalized playback volume of the album as a whole.
Until next time,