Spotify loudness normalization

Spotify's own documentation for artists. T3, and appropriately so: this is the platform stating its own delivery policy, which is exactly the first-party fact a page like this is good for, and nothing here is independently verified.

• Playback is normalised to −14 dB LUFS integrated, measured per ITU-R BS.1770, the same measurement ebu-r128 uses for its −23 LUFS broadcast target.
• Masters quieter than the target get positive gain, with 1 dB of headroom left for the lossy encode.
• Masters louder than the target get negative gain: the volume comes down against the master and "no additional distortion occurs." Loudness pushed into the master is simply given back.
• The user-selectable "Loud" preset (−11 LUFS) does apply a limiter — threshold −1 dB, 5 ms attack, 100 ms decay — to keep soft dynamic tracks from clipping.
• The advice to mastering engineers: target −14 LUFS integrated, keep True Peak below −1 dBTP, and below −2 dBTP if mastering louder than −14, because transcoding to lossy formats overshoots.

The interesting part is the second bullet from the end. A master mixed 6 dB hotter than the target is turned down by 6 dB on playback, so the only thing the extra limiting bought is the damage it did. That is the loudness war's economic argument going away, published by the platform that removed it.

See loudness-normalization for the concept and ebu-r128 for the standard underneath both.