Different loudness levels are appropriate for different genres. That balance varies based on many different factors, with a primary one being genre. In practice, mastering is about striking the right balance between all of these. A good commercial master should be dynamic (if there’s no difference between the softest and loudest levels, the song will be basically unlistenable), but it should also be “loud” and “exciting” (or else it won’t hold the listener’s attention). If you’ve met an audio engineer, you know that we love to ramble on forever about dynamic range, or the difference between the softest and loudest levels in a piece of audio over a given time. This is one reason why we like louder sounds, and why a louder master can sound “better.”

Our brains interpret sound based on signals sent by the vibrations of tiny hairs inside our ears called ‘cilia.’ The louder a sound is, the more it excites our cilia, which in turn means the sound is more exciting to our brains. But if you want to understand more about why you might want to master your music to a certain level (rather than how), read on. If you do want to master to a specified level, Ozone is an incredibly useful tool. In a previous post, we discussed how to master to a specific loudness target (in that case, Spotify’s recommendation) using iZotope’s Ozone 9. This number is constantly thrown around without much justification beyond the fact that it’s the loudness normalization target that Spotify cites.

Illustration: Michael Haddad Let’s just get this out of the way: the answer to “How loud should I master my music?” isn’t always -14 LUFS.

Master your song