We are happy to announce the addition of two new streaming services to the Loudness Penalty website and plugin: Amazon Music and Deezer.
Loudness Penalty plugin with scores for Amazon Music and Deezer
Now you can find out how much your music will be turned down by these services (the so-called “Loudness Penalty”), in addition to YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, Pandora and iTunes.
Why is this important?
Amazon Music is the fastest growing streaming service, and now exceeds 32 million paid users across Amazon Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. In comparison, Spotify has around 100 million paid subscribers, but is growing more slowly. While not as popular as Amazon Music, Deezer nonetheless has about 7 million paid subscribers.
But there are too many services to consider!
There are a lot of streaming services, but thankfully most of them don’t differ that much in how they normalize music. For example, Amazon’s reference level is -14 LUFS and Deezer’s is -15 LUFS - both in-line with YouTube’s (-14 LUFS).
Plus, we don’t recommend mastering to streaming levels anyway! Instead, Loudness Penalty scores give you an idea of how much dynamic “headroom” you might be missing out on (or perhaps your music is too dynamic), so that you can make the best possible decisions about how to mix and master your music.
Shouldn’t I just trust my ears?
We always recommend trusting your ears. That’s why both the Loudness Penalty website and the plugin let you preview how your music will sound at each streaming service’s reference level. That way, you can make direct comparisons to reference tracks that are available on those services, to ensure that your music stands up to the competition.
Desktop, Mobile and Web
At the time of writing, Amazon’s desktop and mobile players offer normalization while the web player does not. On the other hand, Deezer’s desktop and web players normalize but its mobile app does not. Each player that supports normalization has it enabled by default.
Try it Now
The Loudness Penalty website is entirely free and so is the plugin update, for existing users. Grab it by entering your email address on our download page.
