Mastering trends in 2024: what you should be doing

As we slide past the halfway point of 2024 we thought it would be a good opportunity to review some of the key mastering trends from the first half of the year. From LUFS levels of popular songs to tonal balance and width trends, maximum true peak levels and more, we’ll examine the sound of 2024 via data gathered from over 50 songs that have made the top-10 of the Billboard Global 200.

I am admittedly a bit of a data nerd – hi, mastering engineer, does this surprise you? – so I do have some graphs and charts for you. Don’t worry though, I’ll present all the trends in plain English as well. So, without further ado, let’s get into it!

Follow along with this tutorial using Ozone 11, Tonal Balance Control 2, Insight 2, and RX 11.

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What are some mastering trends in music?

In this article, we’re going to look at a number of the musical factors that can often be addressed in mastering, all through the lens of some of the biggest songs of the first half of 2024. If you’re new to mastering, you may want to check out this article, or any of the others on our Audio Mastering Tips & Tutorials page.

Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

• Integrated and short term LUFS, and associated LRA and true peak values
• Width and stereo imaging, including by genre
• Tonal balance across genres, including a custom, downloadable Tonal Balance Control preset

If you need a refresher on any of those topics, the articles linked above are a great place to start.

Finally, let’s talk a little about our data set. To make my measurements I used any song that made it into the top-ten of the Billboard Global 200 during any given week in the first half of 2024. I excluded some Christmas songs that were still on the charts during the first week of the new year since many of them were not even released this decade, much less this year. This gave me a list of 54 songs. While that’s not a huge data set, and does leave some genres underrepresented – R&B/Soul, Soundtrack, etc. – it’s not nothing either, and felt like the right balance to me. I hope you’ll agree.

Okay. Buckle in, and let’s do this!

2024 LUFS trends

There are a few bits of info we can take from the LUFS-based numbers. Certainly, if we’re wondering how loud we should be mastering, the integrated measurements show us the big picture, but there’s also some nuance we can extrapolate from the maximum short-term and LRA measurements.

Integrated LUFS levels

Overall, the average integrated level comes out to -8.3 LUFS, with a standard deviation of 1LU. In other words, the majority of the songs measured come in between -9.3 and -7.3 LUFS. It’s also worth noting the minimum and maximum values in the data set: -11.1 LUFS – Taylor Swift, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” – and -6 LUFS – Tate McRae, “greedy.” Lastly, the loudness levels exhibit a fairly “normal” distribution, meaning that they’re fairly close to a bell curve.

However, we can also break this down by genre to gain a few additional insights. We just have to keep in mind that not all genres are equally represented. We have 21 pop songs, but only one R&B/Soul song. This may partially – or largely – account for some of the variation we see here, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

The thin line represents the minimum and maximum integrated LUFS in a given genre, while the thicker section represents the standard deviation.

What is the industry standard for mastering loudness in 2024?

While the idea of industry standards in music may be appealing if you’re close to the start of your music production and engineering journey, the longer you do this the more you’ll realize that they just don’t really exist, at least not in any conventional sense.

The best we can do is take a retrospective look – as we are here – and see what sorts of trends have been forming or evolving. On the loudness front, for commercial music, we’re mostly seeing releases with an integrated loudness around -8.3 LUFS, ±1LU. However, there are also highly successful commercial releases with integrated loudness ranging from -11.1 LUFS to -6 LUFS.

Maybe – just maybe – we’re starting to see that loudness normalization on streaming platforms is giving us the freedom to master at whatever level is right for the music.

Maximum short-term levels

It can also be instructive to look at the maximum short-term LUFS level during each song. In this category we see an average maximum short-term level of -6 LUFS, again with a standard deviation of 1 LU. Thus, the majority of songs have a maximum short-term level between -7 and -5 LUFS.

Unsurprisingly, there’s also a link between integrated level and maximum short-term level, although there’s still a good deal of overlap. In general though, the maximum short-term level is about 2–4 LU above the integrated level.

Loudness range distribution

Loudness range, or LRA, arguably tells us more about arrangement than it does mastering, but I still think it’s good to be aware of. The distribution of LRA values is a little more haphazard, but we can still use some different statistical tools to extrapolate useful information. The two things we can fairly confidently say are:

1. 50% of the songs exhibit an LRA between 3.7 and 6.8 LU
2. There’s not a strong connection between overall integrated level and LRA

You might expect that lower LRA values would be correlated with higher integrated loudness, indicating more compression and limiting, but in fact the third largest loudness range – 10.3 LU – belongs to the third loudest song – -6.9 LUFS, integrated.

Sure, we can draw a trendline through the data points, but it has a correlation that’s so low that it tells us it’s not really meaningful. What I find interesting about this is that it indicates the macro-dynamics – or musically dynamic ebb and flow – of the songs remains reasonably intact even when the overall loudness is pushed quite high.

2024 True Peak level trends

Alright, on to True Peak levels! Online, much is made of keeping True Peak levels at or below -1.0 dBTP. Spotify even has an official recommendation that if the integrated loudness of your song is higher than -14 LUFS, you should keep peaks below -2 dBTP. So, is anyone actually doing that?

In short, no.

Of the 54 songs surveyed, only 11 – or 20% – had maximum True Peak levels below 0 dBTP. Of those, the lowest were “LUNCH” and “CHIHIRO” by Billie Eilish at -0.3 dBTP. However, 50% of the songs had True Peak levels between 0.00 and +0.75 dBTP.

So, should you worry about true peak levels and true peak limiting? I still prefer to keep my true peaks below about -0.1 to -0.3 dBTP, and often separate sample and true peak limiting stages – after all there are plenty of battery powered listening devices that use lossy, wireless codecs to transmit data and may have limited headroom, even starting to distort slightly below 0 dBFS. Ultimately though, it’s a somewhat personal decision in my opinion.

2024 Musical width trends

Much like LRA, assessing width may tell us more about production and arrangement trends than it does mastering, but certainly width is something we can manipulate and manage at the mastering stage, so again it’s good to be aware of. Width is not something that we typically see a single-number measurement for, so I had to get a bit creative.

To do this I measured the integrated level of the mid and side channels for each song and found the difference between them. The higher the level of the side channel in relation to the mid channel, the closer the resulting number is to 0, and the wider the stereo image. As usual, we can look at the overall distribution of these values.

This shows us that for 50% of the songs, the side channel is between -10.9 and -6 LU lower than the mid channel, with -8.5 LU being the average. More interesting, though, is looking at this by genre, where we see some clearer trends.

While we have five or six genres that don’t really have enough examples to be meaningful, it is fairly clear that pop tends to be the widest, while hip-hop/rap tends to be the narrowest, with country and alternative somewhere in the middle.

2024 Musical Tonal Balance trends

Other than level, one of the biggest things we can change in mastering is tonal balance via EQ. In fact, getting EQ and tonal balance right is arguably one of the most important things we do in mastering. However, that doesn’t mean there’s only one “correct” tonal balance curve for any given song – rather, there is always room for taste, aesthetics, and trends.

To investigate the nature of these trends in 2024, I created a custom Tonal Balance Control curve using the songs from the data set. Not only can you see this curve below, you can also download the 2024 Mastering Trends preset.

One thing to keep in mind is that this curve illustrates a fairly diverse set of genres. We can see this most clearly in the low-end where there’s quite a broad range of bass response that’s represented. By using this Tonal Balance Control curve in conjunction with the Ozone Equalizer, and a good contextual sense of what sort of low-end balance is right for your genre, you can help ensure that your music will translate well across varied playback systems.

Installing Tonal Balance Control presets

To install the 2024 Mastering Trends preset, simply download it and then move it to the following location.

• Mac: Macintosh HD/Users/your username/Documents/iZotope/Tonal Balance Control 2/Target Curves
• Windows: C:\Users\your username\Documents\iZotope\Tonal Balance Control\Target Curves

Once you’ve done that the preset will show up in the main Target Curves dropdown menu inside Tonal Balance Control.

2024 Music deliverables trends

Another trend worth noting is in regards to deliverables. For decades it’s not been uncommon to have a few alternate mixes accompany the main mixes for singles. These frequently include clean, dirty, acapella, instrumental, extended, radio edit, and TV mixes. Two other deliverables that have been popping up recently though included sped up and slowed down versions, driven by platforms like TikTok.

Of the songs used for analysis, only about 7.5% of them included sped up or slowed down versions, so it’s far from universal. Of those songs though, sped up values ranged from 110 – 120.39% of the original speed, while slowed down values ranged from 91.41 – 70% of the original speed.

If you need to provide these types of deliverables you can create them using the Variable Pitch module in RX 11 with the following steps:

• Open and select the entire, mastered song in RX.
• Open the Variable Pitch module.
• Click on the first pitch node, then click on the text box that appears and type in the desired pitch shift amount.
• Click on the final node, then the text box, and enter the same pitch shift value.
• Once you do this, you can see the overall percentage shift, as shown above.
• Make sure “Preserve time” is unchecked, and click render.

Start mastering modern tracks this year

At this point I think it’s fair to ask, “Do we even really care about trends?” After all, if everyone just always followed the current trends, how would new ones arise? Answer: they probably wouldn’t! In fact, this is one of the common criticisms of AI in the arts. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t maintain an awareness of current trends. After all, if we know what they are, it becomes that much easier to buck them entirely, or follow them selectively – or entirely – if and when desired.

So, download the custom Tonal Balance Control curve, file this article away for reference, and keep on making great music. Just don’t forget to look around every once in a while to see if you’ve strayed too far from the beaten path. Then again, maybe if you have, and like the direction it’s headed, you’re the trendsetter blazing the trail for the future.

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