Of the six major services, Spotify is effectively the only one that publishes its reference loudness as a number. Spotify states its -14 LUFS reference and even the three levels listeners can choose from (-11 / -14 / -19) in its official help. The others may say whether the mechanism exists, but the reference value itself does not appear in their public help pages.
The reference values come from Spotify’s official help article “Loudness normalization on Spotify”, and every figure below is taken from that page.
The published values side by side
| Item | Spotify | Apple Music |
|---|---|---|
| Reference loudness | -14 dB LUFSSource: Spotify official help | Not stated |
| Measurement standard | ITU 1770Source: Spotify official help | Not stated |
| Levels listeners can choose | Loud -11 / Normal -14 / Quiet -19 dB LUFS (Premium)Source: Spotify official help | Sound Check on/offSource: Music User Guide (no figures given) |
| Album handling | The whole album is normalized at once. Track by track when shuffling or in playlistsSource: Spotify official help | Not stated |
| Applied to lossless playback | Yes (all playback formats, including FLAC)Source: Spotify official help | Not stated |
| Where it does not apply | The web player, and third-party devices such as TVs and speakersSource: Spotify official help | Not stated |
| Changes to the audio file | None. Gain is applied at playbackSource: Spotify official help | Not stated |
The right-hand column is almost empty, but that is not because we did not look hard enough. It is the result: the public help pages simply do not give a number. Apple Music’s “Sound Check” is described as a setting that evens out song volume, but it does not say what level it evens them out to. It is an on/off choice, and you cannot pick a value.
The public help pages of YouTube Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL and Deezer do not show a reference value either. We cannot tell whether they do not publish one or whether it sits somewhere else in their help.
When the difference matters
With figures for only one service, this is not a comparison but a reading of Spotify’s conditions. Even so, those statements show where differences appear in practice.
-14 LUFS is a target: playback is brought to this level. If a master is louder, it is turned down; if it is quieter, it is turned up. In other words, a master made loud is turned back down on Spotify. This settles a structure in which high loudness does not reach the listener as extra volume.
Under these conditions, the track that topped overseas plays in Spotify Japan’s tally for the first half of 2026 was Kenshi Yonezu’s “IRIS OUT”. We looked at the space in its sound, in an environment where packing in loudness only gets turned back down, in How “IRIS OUT” reached No. 1 worldwide.
Turning things up comes with conditions. The official help says it leaves 1 dB of headroom for lossy encoding, and gives an example: if a track’s loudness is -20 LUFS and its maximum true peak is -5 dBFS, it is raised only to -16 LUFS. A quietly made recording is not necessarily raised all the way to -14.
What reaches listeners most directly is Premium’s “Loud” setting. Choosing it gives -11 LUFS, and the official help says this setting brings tracks to that level regardless of their maximum true peak, and states that a limiter is applied to prevent distortion and clipping. The limiter kicks in at -1 dB (sample values), with a 5 ms attack and a 100 ms decay. So choosing “Loud” means processing is added to tracks with wide dynamics.
For people who listen to quiet music, this specification cannot be ignored. The wider a recording’s dynamic range, the more often the limiter works, so a setting meant to gain volume ends up changing the character of the sound. As a compromise for listening in noisy places it makes sense, but there is no reason to use it in a quiet room.
Album handling is another place where the result depends on how you listen. Play an album straight through and it is normalized as a whole, so the level differences between tracks stay as they were made. Listen to the same track in a playlist, though, and it is normalized track by track, so quiet tracks are lifted. With works that design the drops between tracks, like spiritual jazz, this difference directly changes how the structure comes across.
Whether it applies to lossless is also worth checking. Spotify states that it applies to both compressed and lossless playback. The idea that going lossless lets you hear the original master’s level does not hold. Sound quality and loudness are separate matters, on a different axis from the lossless support conditions covered in our streaming sound quality comparison.
Not for people who want to compare services by the numbers
Playback volume is also tied to the equipment. If you cannot get enough volume from low-impedance gear, it is quicker to check output impedance and damping factor before trying to gain it in settings.
Figures were checked on August 25, 2026, in Spotify’s official help “Loudness normalization on Spotify” and Apple’s Music User Guide. These statements may change without notice.