Spotify Has Literally Turned The Volume Down
Spotify is one of the more prominent streaming services with the high-quality audio it provides and its accessibility. Even though their sound quality has remained the same, people have noticed one change, and that’s the volume.
In early May a group of sound engineers noticed the volume had been reduced on every Spotify hosted track. They used a software called Dynameter to measure the sound. They made this statement:
“Spotify has reduced the LUFS index of everything on its platform from -11 LUFS to -14 LUFS, a number in line with that of competing musical platforms like YouTube (- 13 LUFS), Tidal (-14 LUFS), and Apple Music (-16 LUFS). In practice, the volume for human ears will be more controlled, and you may not even notice the change.”
LUFS refers to Loudness Units relative to Full Scale and was created to measure how our hearing works. It is a more sophisticated system than decibels for human hearing and the purpose of Spotify using this is to improve hearing over time. Sometimes DJs sacrifice sound quality for volume when they want to perform their music by turning the decibels up which can lower quality. Spotify’s goal with this is to keep providing the same high quality music service without having to blast the volume and do long term damage to people’s hearing.
