Loudness

Music production in the past decade faced a challange refered to as 'The Loudness War'. Spotify has recodnized this and added extra measures to prevent music released from competing with loudness. This graph is a perfect represnation of this story; most popular songs have their loudness as -5 dB which is the general volume of the songs and Spotify sets a limit of -14LUFS of loudness before applying methods to reduce volume on the streaming platform when a given song is played. LUFS can be seen as the absolute value of loudness throught the song from highest points to lowest points; -5 dB overral can easily be converted to double of that in LUFS (-10) which is below Spotify's limit to not have the audio file modified in any way and be released as is. Another factor to consider is how most poplar songs have most likely been mastered at the same state-of the art music studios and by mastering engineers who follow the same cristeria.