For background there was a loudness war/race as has been an increasing tendency to increase loudness of music songs and by so removing dynamic range.
Background article on Loudness Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services
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Re: Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it's by design. And sure, I've considered paying for it, but I don't. Does that mean my complaints about the free service are somehow invalid? I'm still a customer, just a different kind of customer, and if they make the experience bad enough for me that I avoid it in some circumstances, that's relevant to their interests. If they didn't want free-tier customers, they wouldn't be offering the free-tier serv…
The free tier is to get paid users. If you have no chance of being paid, Spotify hardly cares whether you stay or go.
If Spotify hardly cared whether free tier users stay or go, the value of their advertising spots would eventually be driven to zero. Do you really think they're going to do that?
Re: Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The free tier is to get paid users. If you have no chance of being paid, Spotify hardly cares whether you stay or go.
If Spotify hardly cared whether free tier users stay or go, the value of their advertising spots would eventually be driven to zero. Do you really think they're going to do that?
To a first approximation that’s true. Premium revenues are ~90% of their revenue.
Re: Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services
#44It's hard to trust a service like this without some information on where they pull the numbers from. How did they determine which normalization algorithm each service uses? The "give us your email address for more information" part also seems slimy.
TIDAL has openly said that they are using -14 LUFS for normalization while Spotify has said they are using ReplayGain. The other platforms required more investigation, and we're continuing to refine the estimates, but we feel that we've gotten pretty close.
Re: Loudness Penalty: Find out if audio will be turned down by streaming services
#45I'm confused about why this website is using the word "penalty" to describe the process of normalizing songs to have the same loudness.
We debated between using the word "penalty" or something more neutral, like "score." In the end, we felt that since most music will be turned down, penalty seemed appropriate, though it is a bit cheeky.