Why audio quality is the unsexy moat

Everyone talks about prompts and stems. Almost nobody talks about the difference between a good master and a bad one. We do.

By Diego Reyes

The music you hear on Spotify is the result of a hundred small decisions about loudness, dynamic range, frequency balance and stereo width. AI music tools that ignore those decisions produce content that sounds almost right — and almost-right is the worst possible place to be.

We ship 48kHz/24-bit WAV by default. We respect Spotify’s -14 LUFS reference loudness. We do not over-compress vocals. We expose stems so you can re-balance the mix if our defaults aren’t right for your project.

We think this is going to be one of the quiet moats over the next year, while everyone else competes on prompt-following.