Most mixing advice is folklore. Somebody heard that club masters hit -7 LUFS, that your sub should be dead mono, that wider is better, and the advice gets repeated until it sounds like physics. We wanted the actual numbers. So we measured 563 released techno and house tracks, signed and distributed records across six styles, and extracted loudness, true peak, spectral balance, stereo image and tempo from every one of them. This is the data we use to calibrate TrackSensei's scoring engine, and we are publishing the headline numbers because most of them disagree with the advice you will find in forums. If you produce club music, some of what follows will probably change how you finish your next track.
The corpus: 563 released tracks, six styles, one pipeline
Every track in the corpus is a finished, released master: label releases and established artists, not bedroom demos. The breakdown: house (54 tracks), tech house (38), groove techno in the Berlin style (57), melodic techno (56), peak-time techno (308) and hard techno (50). Each file went through the same analysis pipeline TrackSensei runs in your browser: integrated LUFS and true peak per the ITU-R BS.1770 family, a Bark-weighted frequency spectrum, multiband stereo correlation, onset and tempo detection, and kick analysis. For every metric we report the median and the middle 50 percent of tracks (the P25 to P75 range), so one outlier release never skews a number.
Finding 1: nobody actually masters at -7 LUFS
The loudness war is the most repeated piece of folklore in club music. Ask a forum how loud a techno master should be and someone will say -7 LUFS, maybe -6, with the implication that anything quieter gets buried in a DJ set. The corpus says otherwise. The median integrated loudness across all 563 tracks sits around -11 LUFS. House lands at -11.35, peak-time techno at -11.0, melodic techno at -12.25. Even hard techno, the most aggressive style in the corpus, medians at -10.3 LUFS. The middle half of released hard techno sits between -11.2 and -9.7: not a single style's interquartile range even touches -9.
Why does the myth survive? Partly because perceived loudness in a club comes from spectral balance and transient control, not from the LUFS integrated number, and partly because producers compare their WIP against mastered references at different monitoring gains. The practical takeaway: if your master sits at -11 or even -12 LUFS and it is dense in the right frequency bands, you are in the same room as the records you play out. Crushing it to -8 to win a number costs you the kick transient that actually makes a system move. We wrote more about targets per platform in how loud should your master be.
Finding 2: released club masters run their true peak hot
This one surprised us. The textbook rule says keep your true peak at or under -1 dBTP so lossy encoders do not clip. The corpus shows released club music ignores that rule completely: the median true peak is above 0 dBTP in every single style. House medians at +1.08 dBTP, tech house at +1.23, peak-time techno at +0.95. Only groove techno stays close to the ceiling at +0.47.
Be careful with this finding. It does not mean true peak is irrelevant; it means the people mastering club records prioritize density on a big system over codec safety, because the primary playback target is a CDJ playing a WAV, not a streaming codec. If your release strategy is Spotify first, the -1 dBTP advice still protects you from encoder clipping. If you are bouncing for DJs, know that the records you are competing with are not leaving that decibel on the table.
Finding 3: the low end is 80 to 92 percent of the energy, and the bass band beats the sub
Sum the energy below 250 Hz in a released techno track and you get almost the whole track. In groove techno the median is striking: 39.9 percent of total energy lives in the sub band (20 to 60 Hz) and another 51.9 percent in the bass band (60 to 250 Hz). That leaves about 8 percent for everything else: hats, synths, vocals, air. The pattern holds across styles, and it contains a subtlety most producers get backwards. The bass band carries more energy than the pure sub in five of the six styles. Released masters get their weight from the 60 to 250 Hz region, the kick body and bass harmonics, not from an enormous 20 to 60 Hz sub. Melodic techno is the one exception where the sub band edges ahead.
If your mixes feel thin next to references even though your sub meter is healthy, this is usually why: the missing weight is kick body and bass harmonics between 60 and 250 Hz, the exact region beginners carve out because someone told them it is "mud". There is real mud up there too, which is why the move is controlled shaping rather than blanket cuts; we covered that trap in why does my mix sound muddy.
Finding 4: the mono low end rule is real, and stricter than the forums say
Collapse a released techno master to mono and measure how much loudness you lose: the median loss is between 0.18 and 0.46 LU depending on style. The common rule of thumb tolerates up to a full 1 LU of mono loss. Real released masters are two to five times stricter than that. Groove techno is the most disciplined of all: a median mono loss of just 0.18 LU. Sub-band stereo correlation tells the same story, with a median of 1.0, fully mono, in every style we measured. The pros are not debating whether to mono the low end. They have simply all done it.
Finding 5: released masters are narrower than you think
On a 0 to 1 stereo width scale, every style in the corpus medians between 0.16 and 0.24. Groove techno is the narrowest at 0.16, house the widest at 0.24, and the styles famous for huge atmospheres, like melodic techno, still median at just 0.20. Big-sounding records get their size from arrangement, reverb depth and contrast, not from pushing a stereo widener until the correlation meter complains. If your width number is double these medians, you are most likely paying for it in mono compatibility on the dancefloor, where many systems sum the low end anyway.
Finding 6: tempo and kick tuning, the quick hits
A few smaller numbers worth keeping in your head. Techno has sped up: peak-time medians at 131 BPM with the middle half reaching 136, and both groove and hard techno median just under 140 BPM. House holds steady at 126. Kick fundamentals cluster between 50 and 62 Hz in every style: house kicks median at 55 Hz, groove techno at 60, hard techno at 62.5. If your kick's fundamental sits at 45 Hz because a tutorial said lower equals heavier, you are fighting physics that released records simply avoid: the energy belongs where the system can reproduce it.
What this means for your next mix
Taken together, the corpus describes a finishing style that is unfashionable to say out loud: more conservative loudness than the forums claim, a strictly mono low end, modest stereo width, and weight built in the 60 to 250 Hz band rather than the sub. If you want a checklist version: master toward -11 LUFS rather than -7 and spend the savings on transients. Keep everything below roughly 120 Hz mono and verify the whole master loses less than half an LU in mono. Check that your bass band carries at least as much energy as your sub band. Keep width around 0.2 and create size with arrangement instead. Tune your kick fundamental into the 50 to 62 Hz pocket. And read the full mixing walkthroughs in how to mix techno and how to mix house with these numbers in hand.
Methodology and limits
All 563 tracks are released masters analyzed at 44.1 kHz through TrackSensei's own DSP pipeline: ITU-style integrated LUFS and true peak, Bark-weighted band energies, multiband correlation, onset density, tempo and kick measurements. We report medians and P25 to P75 ranges, never means, so outliers cannot drag the numbers. Limits worth naming: the corpus skews toward techno (473 of 563 tracks), the style boundaries are editorial judgments, and a median is a description of what is released, not a law about what sounds good. Plenty of great records live outside these ranges. The point of the data is to replace folklore with a measured starting point.
These are exactly the targets TrackSensei scores against. Upload a track or your Ableton project on the analyzer and you will see your own LUFS, true peak, band energies, mono loss and width compared to the same corpus, with concrete notes on what to change. Your track against 563 released records, in about two minutes.