Spotify is now more dynamic than ever!

Spotify is now more dynamic than ever! Well... not as such, but you know what I mean! The Spotify team has recently made some changes on the loudness / volume normalisation feature. In the past it was a fixed setting that the user could not change apart from choosing to have it turned on or not. In May of 2017 we witnessed a positive change in their loudness "target" when they dropped it by - 3 dB. I wrote a post about it that you can read here. But this new change is way more drastic and offers the user some options. The old version had the feature "hidden" in the "Advanced Settings" menu but the new version has it very prominently placed in they "Music Quality" section of the Settings.

Spotify is still using ReplayGain as it seems but I'll throw some LUFS measurements in for the hell of it :) I took 5 songs (Kanye West, Calvin Harris, Dua Lips, Post Malone, Drake, Ariana Grande) of the Global Top 50 playlist and measured it with Insight from iZotope and Dynameter from Meterplugs (via MenuBus). (PS. if you haven't check out the Loudness Penalty site from MeterPlugs, you should...!) Here are the results. Loud volume setting: -11 LUFS. True peak @ -0.3 dBTP

Normal volume setting: -14 LUFS. True peak @ -3.3 dBTP

Quiet volume setting: -22 LUFS. True peak @ -11.3 dBTP

I've been checking and measuring the settings on occasions in the last few days and I've seen overs in some material. I'll update this post with more measurements (on different material) when time allows. Disclaimer: Again... Spotify is NOT using LUFS to control loudness levels. They might in the future though!