How loud should your master be for Spotify, Beatport and the club?

What normalisation actually does

Every major streaming platform measures the integrated loudness of your track and applies a gain offset so it plays back at roughly the same perceived level as everything around it. Spotify targets about -14 LUFS. If you deliver a master at -6 LUFS, it does not play louder — it gets turned down by 8 dB. What you keep is the damage you did to get there: the flattened transients, the pumping, the smaller-sounding drop.

What each destination does with your file

• Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal: normalised on playback. Delivering louder than the target gains you nothing.
• Beatport and download stores: no normalisation. The file plays exactly as delivered, which is why a lot of club records still master hotter here.
• A club system: the file is played through a DJ mixer with its own gain staging. Headroom and a clean low end matter far more than integrated loudness.
• True peak: keep it at or below -1 dBTP. Lossy encoding (the AAC and Ogg files the platforms actually serve) creates peaks that were not in your WAV, and a master sitting at 0 dBFS will clip after encoding.

So what do you target?

For electronic music intended for both streaming and the club, a master landing between -9 and -7 LUFS integrated with true peaks at -1 dBTP is a sane place to be. That is louder than the Spotify target on purpose: it keeps the record competitive on Beatport and on a club system, and the streaming platforms will simply turn it down without penalty. What you should not do is chase -5 LUFS, because past a certain point the only way to get there is to destroy the transients that make a kick hit.

And measure integrated loudness across the whole track, not across the drop. A record whose drop reads -7 LUFS but whose breakdown drags the integrated value to -12 is not quiet — it is dynamic, which is the thing normalisation now rewards.

Get your track mastered→