Why does my master sound worse on Spotify?

Your master sounds great in your DAW, then you hear it on Spotify and it's quieter, duller, harsher or smaller. Nothing is wrong with Spotify, and usually nothing is badly wrong with your master either. Between your bounce and the listener's ears, three things change: the level it plays at, the encoding it goes through, and the gear and settings it's played on. Each has a fix.

1. It plays at a different level

Spotify turns every track to about −14 LUFS. If your master is at −8, it's turned down 6 dB, and when you flip from your DAW at full level to Spotify, the drop sounds like a loss of energy. Louder nearly always sounds "better" for a few seconds, which is why this comparison fools everyone. See How loud should you master?

Three details make it more confusing:

• Quiet, dynamic masters can be limited by Spotify. In the app's Loud setting (−11 LUFS), Spotify raises quiet tracks regardless of their peaks and runs a limiter to stop them clipping. If you master quietly on purpose, some listeners hear Spotify's limiting rather than yours.
• Quiet masters may not be turned up at all. At the normal setting, Spotify only raises a track until its peaks reach −1 dBTP. A master at −18 LUFS with peaks at −1 dBTP plays 4 dB quieter than its neighbours.
• Some players don't normalise. Spotify's web player and third-party devices such as TVs and smart speakers play files without normalisation, so the same song can sound louder in one place than another.

2. It's encoded

Most listeners don't hear your WAV. Spotify streams a compressed version whose quality depends on the listener's settings:

From Spotify's audio quality page, checked October 2026. Lossless started rolling out to Premium in September 2025 and has to be switched on by each listener on each device, so most plays are still lossy. "Automatic" lowers the quality on a weak connection.

Lossy encoders throw away detail the ear is least likely to miss, and some masters suffer more than others:

• Peaks go up. Encoders cut the very top of the spectrum and that reshapes the waveform, so peaks often rise 1 to 2 dB on loud, bright masters. Past full scale, that's distortion that isn't in your file. This is the most common cause of a "crunchy" Spotify version. See Peaks: sample, true and codec.
• Bright, busy top end smears. Dense hi-hats, cymbals, noise risers and bright reverbs are the hardest things to encode, especially at lower bitrates. They can turn swirly or grainy.
• Very wide stereo narrows or turns phasey. Encoders save bits on side information, so extreme widening and out-of-phase tricks in the highs can collapse or warble. See Stereo and mono.
• Heavy clipping gets worse. Encoders struggle with the extra harmonics of hard clipping, so an already-clipped master degrades more than a cleanly limited one.

3. It's played on different gear

• Phones and laptop speakers have almost no low end. A mix whose energy is all in the sub sounds thin and quiet on them. Check that the bass still reads in the 100 to 300 Hz range. See The low end.
• Bluetooth re-encodes audio again on the way to the headphones, adding a second layer of lossy compression.
• The listener's settings. Spotify's app has an equaliser and a volume level setting (Loud, Normal, Quiet). If your Spotify sounds odd, check yours first: an equaliser left on can change everything you hear.

4. The upload chain

Upload a 24-bit (or 16-bit) WAV at the sample rate you mixed at, and don't upload an MP3 or AAC: encoding twice makes artefacts much worse. Spotify's lossless tier goes up to 44.1 kHz, so higher-rate files are converted, which is harmless. Don't add a limiter or clipper after your final ceiling, and only dither once. See Exporting and delivery.

Drop your master on MasterScope to check the loudness, density, codec peak and stereo in your browser, with a pass or fix for Spotify and the other platforms.

Spotify's normalisation and limiter details are from its loudness normalisation guide.