Back in late May we told you about Nugen Audio Running A Streaming Service Survey and asked if could help. This survey comes in the context of more and more context being delivered using streaming services and that more and more of these streaming services are now normalising to loudness so that their users don't have to turn their volume up or down from track to track.
In 2014 in any given week across America, 67% of music fans tapped into streaming music. In 2015 demand increased by 83% for online audio streaming services. Like it or not, streaming is huge and it's here to stay.
Nugen Audio asked five questions in this survey, and we can share excerpts of the results that they found....
- Does music streaming signal the end of the loudness wars?
- 59% think that the end may be in sight
- Could loudness normalisation affect how your music is heard? (Apple SoundCheck, Spotify, YouTube, DAB loudness normalised radio, Music TV broadcast etc.)
- 86% think yes.
- Are you concerned that playout services may degrade your audio with codec compression?
- Over 80% of respondents concerned about maintaining quality through playout services’ codec compression.
- Are you confident that the music you deliver will make it through to the listener as you intended?
- Given the informed nature of the respondents, however (see below), there is some understanding of the impacts that loudness normalization and codec conversion has on audio.
- How good is your understanding of loudness normalisation?
- 30%, however, are still in a learning curve.
With responses from 50 different countries, Nugen Audio say that it's clear there is an active, world-wide interest in these issues. they also acknowledge that survey respondents were a self-selected group, reached through online audio production communities. The results do show that they were clearly highly informed, with 68% claiming a reasonable working knowledge of loudness matters, rising to 99% finding that it 'mostly makes sense' or better and so the results should be interpreted in the light of this.
You can read the full details of the results here and download a report from Nugen Audio.
New Free Music Streaming Video Series Coming Soon
In that context our own Loudness guru, Mike Thornton has created a series of three free video tutorials designed to fit into the process to help increase people's understanding of loudness and the impacts that come with an increased use of music streaming services to deliver music to the consumer. Watch out for these videos over the next couple of weeks.