[MLA] More good news (Spotify)

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi Ian,

> You may already know about this, or have been involved, but my spies have made me aware that Spotify just reduced their loudness reference level to approximately -14 LUFS !

That is _wonderful_ news!! A mastering friend of mine just wrote a message about this too. He said he now really will never use his brickwall limiter anymore. The subject of his email was "Victory!" :-)

> Eelco, this might make a nice addition to your presentation ?!

Unfortunately that presentation was already yesterday so I missed that - it would have definitely been a great addition to my presentation. Tidal and Spotify are now at the same target level, which happens to be my recommended level for the loudest track of the album. It will not take too much effort I hope to convince Spotify to change to album normalization once Tidal has done so and... maybe Apple!

Yesterday Buddy Judge, senior product manager at Apple and responsible for iTunes, came to me after my presentation. We had a beer and then we even went for dinner together ("all on Tim" :-). Buddy is a cool guy and a musician (I guess Bob Ludwig knows him well since he is also the guy behind "Mastered for iTunes"). Buddy told me a few interesting things that may help us understand why normalization was not turned on by default yet:
1. The artistic integrity is very important for Apple. Just like Tidal they do not like that with track normalization the loudness integrity of an album is disturbed. Buddy told me it had never come to his mind to advocate using album normalization even in shuffle mode, but he found it an interesting concept that he would love to test.
2. Buddy said that if normalization would be turned on by default, all streaming services should use the same type of normalization so mastering engineers can anticipate to it and would not have to make seperate masters for every different platform (because many will likely still aim for being the loudest). ITU BS1770 seemed to make most sense to him, although he knew that compressed music is measured a little too loud by BS1770. Album normalization with the loudest track aligned to target level also made most sense (in my presentation I showed that when normalizing the _average_ album level (like currently in iTunes), the loudness of the loud hit tracks would only be known when the full album is finished - this is a clear no-go for a mastering engineer).

We promised to stay in regular contact the next few months and all in all this feels _very_ encouraging. 

But this brings me to an important note. Pop music mastering engineers might even be worse than Italian commercial mix engineers. So if the latter ingest 20 kHz tones just above the relative gate threshold, to gain 1 or 2 dB of level, this will probably happen to pop masters too. Florian, it will become even more important to convince ITU to add the HF low pass filter to K weighting, so we better make sure that this development is not delayed too much...

Cheers,
Eelco