As far as I can tell, 95% of the music you're hearing online is normalized, in 2022.
But what does that mean, and how did I come to that conclusion ? And most importantly, why should you care ?
What it means
In a nutshell, normalization means that any really loud music is being reduced in level to stop you being "blasted" by large changes in volume.
This is true on ALL the major platforms now, by default - Apple was the last streamer to move to using LUFS, and normalization is now enabled by default on all new Macs and iOS devices. And most streamers are using a Distribution Loudness of -14 LUFS, with a few exceptions.
(Of course this doesn't mean you need to master your music to -14 LUFS, or any other particular loudness target. Streaming platforms apply normalization for us, so we don't have to. Just master so that it sounds good to you, Preview it at the same integrated loudness as other suitable reference material, tweak if necessary, and once you're happy with the result, move on.)
How we know
Well actually, we don't, for sure - but here's how I tried to work it out:
I took the numbers supplied by Midia Research at the end of this blog post for total music streaming users on a wide range of platforms. For each streamer, I assumed that if normalization is enabled by default then that's how people will listen, and if it isn't, they won't.
(Of course that's an over-simplification, but I've been told that only 17% of Spotify users change the normalization settings, and since some people will certainly enable it on other platforms or in players, my guess is that it's a decent approximation)
Then I simply worked out how many users were being normalized by default as a percentage, and I got… 72%
[Insert record scratch FX]
Wait, what ?
Didn't I say it was 95% ? I mean, 72% is pretty impressive, but it's not 95% - why the big difference ?
Because I ignored the elephant in the room, an elephant which is the real point of this post.
All the music streaming service users together amounted to roughly 435 million users. (That's a lot of users). But this number doesn't account for the number of people who listen to music on the world's biggest video streaming service… YouTube.
That number, YouTube claims, is two billion.
That's 2000 million !
That's more than four times as many users as all the dedicated music streaming services put together. And YouTube normalizes everything - all the time.
82% of music heard online is normalized, by default.
And when we add those numbers into the equation, we get the 95% normalized result.
Which means that even if I'm wrong, and those 17% of users only ever disable normalization and no-one ever enables it… 92% of people will still be listening to normalized audio.
Why you should care
It's probably obvious by now, but just in case:
Even you master your music really loud, 95% of people listening online will never notice.
Or, put another way - if you want to master your music with more balanced dynamics, it might sound a little quieter… but only to 5% of online listeners.
(And bear in mind that means mastering below -14 LUFS, which is really quite low, for a lot of material ! If you want to master at -10 LUFS, or -12, or even -14… you're safe to do so.)
BUT
This analysis is almost certainly wrong.
The figures are out of date, they're likely inaccurate or not comparing like for like, I've made several assumptions that may not be true… so why am I making a big deal about them ?
Because at the end of the day, the number of people using YouTube to watch and listen to music is so huge, the details of the other services don't really matter. We can still say for sure that something like 80% of the music heard online is always being normalized, because it's all being heard on YouTube.
It's still not quite that simple, though
Of course the really big flaw in this whole discussion is that in reality there's far more to sounding loud than just raw LUFS measurements.
It's about density, it's about EQ balance, dynamic structure, intensity, distortion, saturation and above all else the performance, material and arrangement. It's not how loud you make it, it's how you make it loud. To see and hear an example of how this works in practise, click here.
Here's the thing, though - all those factors are opportunities. Creative opportunities, to make your music sound exactly the way you want it to, including really loud, even when it's been normalized.
The one thing you don't need to do, is worry about the LUFS.