[MLA] More good news (Spotify)

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi Bob,

> I had two questions:
> 
> 1.  I agree that all services should use the same algorithm for normalization.
> 
> Eelco, I’m not clear about this:
> VERY often we do a single that is being released before the album is finished.  
> How will the average album level be determined if there is no album with which to measure when the single is released?

Good question. How I see this is that the pre-release track will be an 'album' on its own until the rest of the tracks are uploaded. If the label then decides to have this track only available as part of an album, it will be treated as such and will get its relative level. I am pretty confident that in the future artists will make sure their hit songs will be the loudest tracks on the album, so they will always stay at -14 LUFS. I guess that is a compromise we can live with. Usually the hit songs are loud anyway. Probably some artists will decide to not release albums, but just singles. This is all good for me, the net effect is similar to releasing an album with all tracks at equal level, or to track normalization. That is the free choice of an artist. In fact this offers a "best of both worlds" solution: if you prefer track normalization over album normalization: just release only singles. 

> 2. Does Sound Check measure highly compressed music any better than BS1770 (I assume -4)?  I’d be surprised if it did.

I agree. I talked to David Josephon in Berlin. He is involved in aircraft noise measurement with people from Nasa. Results so far show that subjective loudness is more determined by peak levels than thought so far. This could be the reason why dynamic music sounds louder after BS1770 normalization than compressed music. 

My personal vision is that this is a kind of revenge after all these years of sausage production. The downside of course is that people could start online debates against it because their favorite music sounds "too soft". But I think/hope that this resistance will not be strong enough to stop this development. Their band will soon release loud dynamic masters anyway. That could be so simple as to replace the CD masters by the digital vinyl masters that are readily available for most recent albums...

> I’m very encouraged by all of this!

Yes, me too!

All the very best,
Eelco