How Loud Should You Master Your Music?

Mastering for streaming services can seem confusing, but it doesn’t have to be!
In this discussion, I talk about the things to watch out for when mastering to make sure that your music sounds good on all the major streaming services. Please check out my message at the end and have a chat with me in the comments, I’d love to carry on the discussion.

🎧 Here is the link to get the loudness meter I use:

Youlean Loudness Meter Lite

With a high quality loudness meter, you don’t need to second guess your mastering. You can just focus on making your music sound it’s best.

0:00 – Introduction
0:40 – The Best Loudness Meter
1:20 – Loudness Discussion
2:02 – Why Does True Peak Loudness Matter?
3:30 – Why Do LUFS Matter?
6:30 – Why You Should Make A “Social Media” Master
7:30 – Full Mastering Checklist
9:53 – Important Final Note 🙂

🎧 Full Mastering Checklist:

1) You only need to make 1 master but I strongly advise making an additional master for social media promotion (more about that in a moment).

2) Keep the true peak loudness below -1.0dB to avoid clipping when your music is encoded to a lossy format. You can have a higher ceiling, and many professionals do (including me), but this will cause some clipping in compressed formats.

3) Almost all genres and styles of music can be compressed to between -12 and -16LUFS integrated (average) without losing impact and dimension. You can push this louder and have a higher short term loudness, but this will cause gain reduction to be applied. Louder masters can still sound punchy and exciting, and this is a case of personal preference. No one is right or wrong here!

4) Create a “social media” master with a true peak ceiling of -2.0dB. This will sound significantly better on applications such as Instagram and FaceBook which are notorious for distorted and crunchy audio!

5) Keep backups of your original mixes. You never know when you’ll need to remaster them.

🌍 My Website / Contact / Hire me – https://michaelwynneaudio.com

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