LUFS Targets by Platform: Spotify, Apple, Tidal, YouTube

What LUFS does each streaming platform normalize to?

The full reference chart is below. These are the integrated loudness levels each platform turns your track toward at playback. The two columns that matter beyond the number are direction (does the platform only turn loud tracks down, or also push quiet ones up) and type (does it level each track on its own, or balance a whole album together).

A couple of these carry honest caveats. Amazon Music has no public technical spec I could confirm, and sources split between -13 and -14, so treat it as roughly -14. Pandora doesn't use LUFS at all under the hood. It runs a proprietary measurement, and -14 is just the figure industry summaries use to approximate it. I'd rather flag that than pretend the number is gospel.

Why is Apple Music the odd one out at -16 LUFS?

Apple's normalization feature is called Sound Check, and since around 2022 it measures in LUFS and levels to -16, a touch quieter than the -14 most platforms use. That two-LU gap traces back to a standard: the AES TD1008 recommendation, the industry-consensus document for streaming loudness, targets -16 LUFS as the album-level distribution loudness for music, and Apple followed it.

Sound Check only ever turns audio down. A track quieter than -16 LUFS plays at its own level. Apple won't push it up. That's the same behavior as most of the platforms in the chart, and Spotify is the one real exception.

Spotify is the only platform that turns quiet tracks up

This is the single most misunderstood line in the chart. Most platforms are one-directional: too loud gets turned down, anything already at or below target is left alone. Spotify in its Normal mode is the exception. It applies positive gain to lift quieter masters up toward -14 LUFS.

There's a limit, and it's tied to true peak. Spotify won't add so much gain that your true peak crosses -1 dBFS. Their own documentation gives the example: a track sitting at -20 LUFS with a true peak of -5 dBFS only gets lifted to -16 LUFS, because adding the full 6 dB to reach -14 would push that peak past the ceiling. The headroom in your master directly caps how much upward gain Spotify can give you.

The true peak ceiling is the one number that stays fixed

Every major platform converges on -1 dBTP. Spotify recommends below -1 dBFS for lossy delivery (and below -2 dBTP for masters louder than -14), Apple's Digital Masters program requires -1 dBTP, YouTube and Tidal both land on -1 dBTP. It traces back to EBU R 128 and the AES TD1008 streaming recommendation, and the platforms independently agreed on it.

The reason it's universal is that every platform delivers audio through a lossy codec, and that encoding step can push inter-sample peaks up by as much as a dB above your source. Leave -1 dB of true peak headroom and you absorb that without clipping. The full mechanics of inter-sample peaks live on the true peak limits guide.

So which number do I actually master to?

Master once. Don't cut a separate file per platform. Because every DSP normalizes at playback and most only turn you down, a master that sounds right around -14 LUFS integrated with a -1 dBTP ceiling translates cleanly everywhere on this chart. Apple plays it 2 LU quieter, Spotify might nudge it up if you left room, but you're not fighting any of them.

Loudness is normalized for you now. The thread running through this whole mastering-for-streaming cluster is that chasing an exact target number per platform is solving a problem the normalization already solved. Master for how it sounds at the normalized level: enough dynamics to stay punchy, true peak under the ceiling, and let the platforms do the leveling. The pillar guide on mastering for streaming walks the full strategy.

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