Craft · Mastering · 2026-07

Mastering for streaming, without chasing loudness

Every platform turns your master down to roughly the same level. Knowing that changes what a master should aim for.

Streaming platforms normalise playback. If your master comes in louder than their target, it gets turned down on the way to the listener. The loudness war that shaped mastering through the 2000s no longer buys you anything on the platforms where most people now listen.

What actually happens to your file

Each service measures the integrated loudness of the track and applies gain to bring it near its own target. The targets differ slightly between services and they change over time, which is exactly why chasing a specific number is the wrong strategy. A master that is pushed far above any of them arrives quieter and more squashed than one that was left alone.

Turning it up in the studio does not make it louder for the listener. It only makes it smaller.

What to protect instead

Dynamic range is the thing that survives normalisation. Two masters played back at the same measured loudness will sound different, and the one that kept its transients will sound bigger. That is the whole argument for restraint on the limiter.

True peak matters too. Lossy encoding can push peaks above where they sat in your file, so a master that just touches zero can clip after conversion. Leaving headroom below the ceiling costs nothing audible and prevents distortion that you will never hear in your own studio.

Different releases want different treatment

A club track and a solo vocal record should not be mastered to the same target. Dance music genuinely benefits from density because it is played loud on systems that reward it. A voice-and-instrument record does not — compressing it to the same level removes the exact thing people came for.

When someone sends me a record I ask where it will actually be heard. That answer shapes the master more than any number.

The mix decides the ceiling

Mastering can improve a mix. It cannot rescue one. If a mix arrives with a buried vocal, a low end that fights itself, or an arrangement with no space in it, the limiter will only make those problems louder. The right move is to say so and go back a step.