Is Mastering Your Music To Spotify’s -14 LUFS Integrated Recommendation A Good Idea?

No. Of course it isn’t. But sometimes it is! But really, no.

It's true that just because Spotify normalizes to -14 LUFS, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to master your music to that level. The loudness level you choose to master to will depend on your personal, artistic, and creative goals, as well as the specific genre and style of music you're working on.

That being said, it's generally a good idea to keep in mind the loudness levels that other tracks in your genre are being mastered to, as well as the trends and preferences of listeners on the platform(s) where you plan to distribute your music. Because music is listened to on other places besides Spotify, right?! Ultimately, the most important thing is to ensure that your music sounds good and translates well across different playback systems, as any competent mastering engineer would do. This is why working with an experienced mastering engineer is worth every penny.

Ok, let’s just game that out for a second or three:

Option A: you master to -14LUFS because the internet says you should for Spotify.

Option B: you master to -10LUFS because that’s where it sounds good.

Then...

Scenario 1: The Spotify listener has volume normalisation turned on and set to ‘normal’ (-14LUFS).

Option A plays with no change, sounds exactly the same and plays at an even level with other material thanks to the normalisation.

Option B gets turned down 4dB, sounds exactly the same and plays at an even level with other material thanks to the normalisation.

Scenario 2: The Spotify listener has volume normalisation turned off.

Option A plays with no change, sounds exactly the same. But is noticeably quieter than a lot of other commercial material on Spotify.

Option B plays with no change, sounds exactly the same and is in the same ballpark as most commercial material; maybe a touch quieter.

Scenario 3: The Spotify listener has volume normalisation turned on and set to ‘loud’ (-11LUFS).

Option A gets turned up and incurs about 3dB of Spotify’s automatic limiter, changing the way the transients sound.

Option B gets turned down 1dB, sounds exactly the same and plays at an even level with other material thanks to the normalisation.

There’s other scenarios, like the ‘quiet’ (-23LUFS) normalisation setting; or 12 months from now Spotify changes their normalisation target to -16LUFS and renders the previous -14LUFS ‘standard’ meaningless; and so on.

At the end of the day, your mastering engineer should make it sound good on its own or with its other songs on the album. It needs to work for itself, not other songs on other playlists that might sound nothing like the song you are working on. Let’s not also forget Spotify has changed their recommendations before. It used to be -11 LUFS and changed a few years back to -14 LUFS. It will likely change again in the future and if you are mastering for what they recommend now, you’ll be out of luck in the future.

Master for the song, not the number and you will be much more happy in the long run.