Album Cover Size: 3000 × 3000 Pixels

What Size Should an Album Cover Be?

Make it 3000 × 3000 pixels. That's the size Apple Music and most distributors ask for, and since every other store shrinks your cover from there, one 3000 px file covers everything. The full checklist:

• Size: 3000 × 3000 pixels
• Shape: a perfect square, 1:1
• File type: JPG or PNG
• Colour: RGB, not CMYK
• Quality: sharp, not stretched up from a smaller image

Album Cover Size for Spotify, Apple Music and Every Store

Every store and distributor sets its own limits, straight from their help pages. A 3000 × 3000 RGB JPG under 10 MB passes all of them except SoundCloud's own uploads, which cap files at 2 MB (the checker above makes a lighter copy for that).

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL and Deezer get your cover from your distributor, so the distributor's rules are the ones that count. All of them want a square, and none of them want you to enlarge a small image to hit the size.

Album Cover Size for Vinyl, CD and Cassette

Print is the opposite of streaming: pressing plants want CMYK colour at 300 DPI, plus a bleed (extra picture past the edge that gets trimmed off). Sizes vary a little between plants, so always start from your plant's template. Typical sizes:

A 3000 px streaming cover is only 10 inches wide at 300 DPI, so it's too small for a 12-inch sleeve. If vinyl is in the plan, design big from the start and make the 3000 px version from that.

What Gets an Album Cover Rejected?

These are the rules stores and distributors list most often:

• Text that doesn’t match your release exactly: the artist name and title on the cover must be spelled just as you entered them.
• Web addresses, social media handles, email addresses, phone numbers and QR codes.
• Prices, “out now” stickers, adverts for merch, and anything promotional.
• Store or streaming logos (Spotify, Apple, iTunes) and words like “exclusive”.
• Mentions of a format, such as “CD”, “vinyl” or “digital”, and audio badges like “lossless” or “Dolby Atmos”.
• Blurry, pixelated, stretched, rotated or cut-off art, uneven borders, or a small picture sitting in a big white space.
• Nudity, gore or hate symbols, and anything misleading, such as a famous artist who isn’t on the release.
• A plain single-colour square, the same art as another release, or a stock image other artists have already used.
• Images you don’t have the rights to. The person or company that made the picture has to have given you permission.

Spotify Canvas and Playlist Cover Sizes

A Spotify Canvas is the short looping video that replaces your cover art on the Now Playing screen in the mobile app. It has to be vertical 9:16, 720 to 1080 pixels tall and 3 to 8 seconds long, as an MP4 (or a JPG). Spotify rejects uploads that are even slightly off, and Canvases can't include links, brand logos or prompts to follow you.

For playlist covers, Spotify doesn't publish a size. Any square JPG works, and 1000 × 1000 pixels or more stays sharp on big screens.

How to Design an Album Cover

1. Start at the right size. Set up a 3000 × 3000 pixel canvas in any design app. If it's also going on vinyl or CD, work bigger and at print resolution from the start.
2. Build it around one strong image. A photo, an illustration or a bold graphic. Covers are seen tiny in playlists, so one clear idea beats lots of detail.
3. Keep the text short and big. Most covers only need the artist name and the title, and many use none at all. Whatever you add has to be readable at thumbnail size.
4. Match your release details exactly. If the artist name or title is on the cover, spell it exactly as you'll enter it with your distributor. Stores reject covers that don't match.
5. Leave off links and logos. No web addresses, social handles, prices or store logos. They get releases rejected.
6. Check it small. Drop it into the checker above and look at the 64 px preview. If you can't tell what it is, simplify.
7. Export a JPG in RGB. Then run it through the checker to make sure it passes before you upload.

Releasing the song with a video? The free audio visualizer puts your cover art in the middle of bars that move with the music, and the MP3 to MP4 converter turns the song and cover into a video for YouTube.