[MLA] Loudness War in New York Times

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi all,

I received a message from Wessel Oltheten about his mastering loudness level. I have put it in Google Translate to give you an impression of this positive story:

"I have now delivered everything at -14 a -13LUFS in the past three years, and some acoustic albums even softer. And I mean everything. For the past three years I send the following 'disclaimer' along with every file that goes out the door:

> Finally, a little information about loudness: the masters are aligned to the loudness that streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Tidal use. This means that the masters are hardly restricted in terms of dynamics - good news for the music! But the files may appear softer compared to other materials. This is not the way the consumer will hear it; if you want to get a real picture you can best compare the masters in iTunes with other tracks: if you enable the 'sound check' option in the preferences, iTunes plays your entire library on the same loudness, similar to the way streaming services and broadcasters normalize loudness.

In those three years I have sometimes had to give some extra explanation, but there is no one, but no one at all, who asked me for a louder master! Last year I worked on 600 songs for more than 100 different customers, so I think that's a nice sample. I even notice that people (including musicians) are already familiar with the information about standardization. They then trust that I know what number it should be, and just listen to the sound. In my world of relatively small artists it is therefore nice and grateful to be allowed to work, and 'persevering' does not cost any effort. That is beautiful thanks to PLOUD, Spotify and YouTube!

PS I did tell one big dance label at the time that I do not want to work for them anymore because they only kept asking for a ridiculous rms-number after my explanation. In this case, the artist and producer had even asked me if I could go back a step further in loudness with respect to my first master (!), But there was a disagreement with the label that kept insisting on making it loud. Ah, I do not miss such customers and I'm busier than ever.”

Now, that is what I mean an encouraging story… Loudness normalizing does help.

All the best,
Eelco