How loud should we master pop music?
When mastering pop music, it is important to orientate yourself to the current conditions in terms of loudness, dynamics and frequency response in order to do justice to the listener's ideas of the sound of current pop music. In this article, we provide a guide to loudness when mastering pop music.
In the field of pop music, too, Andreas Brede from the Triagon Academy wrote as part of his thesis on the topic "Digitization in the music industry and the impact on mastering for streaming platforms” various titles from the genre Pop analyzed. You can see the results in the graphic below.
For the loudness analysis of Pop Titles, the original audio files of various songs were evaluated and graphically processed. Even if there is sometimes a big difference between the individual pieces, a direction in terms of loudness can be identified by determining the mean value.
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Pop music is often about catchy melodies and lyrics that are easy to sing along to. The rhythm is also often defined and danceable. The song structure is clearly structured and the total playing time is often no more than 3 minutes. Pop music is subject to constant genre and trend changes. In addition, modern effects and technologies are often used in popular music.
The graphic above clearly shows that modern pop music moves in the upper loudness range, but remains quite dynamic in its origin. This way the songs don't get boring and sound alive.
How exactly the streaming services deal with your pop music production after the mastering is explained in our Upload Streaming Services Article summarized for you.
If you have further questions about pop mastering, LUFS or audio editing for streaming services, please let us know! We are also there for you if you need professional help with your music project!
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Other useful information:
48 khz sample rate - why 44,1 khz will soon be out:
https://www.peak-studios.de/48-khz-der-neue-standard/
Intersample Peaks - Why 2dbTP headroom is better
https://www.peak-studios.de/intersample-peaks/
Streaming mastering from Peak-Studios:
