Our Data

Every measurement, credit, and piece of release metadata on lufs.to was gathered and curated by us, and the dataset as a whole belongs to us. Anyone is welcome to use the site and its data, including professionals using it in their own work. What needs a license is packaging or redistributing the data commercially.

What's in the dataset

Per-track loudness measurements: integrated LUFS, true peak, loudness range, short-term max, and dynamic range. See Methodology for how they're measured.
Release metadata: artist, album, year, label, catalog number, genre, source, and the relationships between them.
Where they could be verified, mastering engineer and studio credits, and per-track performer, remixer, and DJ-mix credits.

Free to use, including in professional work

You don't need permission to look things up, reference the numbers, or cite them. That includes mastering and mixing engineers, producers, labels, journalists, educators, and researchers using the data in their day-to-day work, or in articles, videos, talks, and course material. Please credit lufs.to and link back to lufs.to where you publish it.

What needs a license

A license is required to package, resell, or redistribute the data, or to build it into something you distribute or sell. That includes, for example:

republishing the dataset, or a substantial part of it, in any form;
reselling or sublicensing it, or bundling it into a paid or ad-supported product, app, plugin, or service;
incorporating it into another commercial database or dataset.

AI and machine learning

This explicitly includes AI training. Using lufs.to's data to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a machine learning model, to build a training corpus or embeddings/retrieval index, or to otherwise incorporate it into an AI system or dataset, is commercial use under these terms — whether the data is reproduced verbatim, paraphrased, or just absorbed into a model's weights. It requires a license, the same as any other commercial use above. Scraping the site to assemble training data without a license is not authorized.

To ask about a license, get in touch through the Contact page. If you're not sure whether your use counts, ask before you start.

Please be considerate

This is a small, hand-built project. Don't scrape the site in a way that degrades it for others, and don't present the data as your own. Found a mistake? We'd like to hear about it.

See also: Terms for the full ground rules, including our disclaimers on accuracy and completeness.