Album Cover Size and Dimensions Every Distributor Asks For

The short answer: Album cover art is square — a 1:1 aspect ratio — and 3000×3000 pixels is the master size to work to. Apple Music asks for 3000×3000 or larger with a floor of 1400×1400; Spotify accepts between 640px and 10,000px square in TIFF, PNG or JPG encoded in sRGB; Bandcamp's minimum is 1400×1400. Export one 3000×3000 sRGB square and every store is satisfied. The two things that actually get artwork rejected are upscaling a small file to hit the number, and leaving an embedded colour profile or rotation metadata in the export.

The spec, platform by platform

Each figure below comes from that platform's own documentation, checked on 5 September 2026. Get the master right once and it is settled for the whole release — including as the reference image you hand to a music video workflow later.

Spotify's upper bound is worth noting because almost nobody hits it: the accepted range runs to 10,000px wide and tall. There is no reason to deliver at that size, but it tells you the ceiling is not what constrains you.

Two rules sit outside the numbers altogether, and they cause more rejections than any dimension. Spotify's page says plainly: "Don't upscale images. We also don't support embedded color profiles and orientation metadata." DistroKid adds that artwork must be a single image file — no multi-page layouts, regardless of whether the release is a single, an EP or an album — and that duplicate artwork reused across releases may be rejected.

Why 3000×3000 became the convention

It is not a magic number and nothing in the format demands it. It is simply the largest figure any major store publishes as a recommendation — Apple's — and every other requirement in the table fits comfortably inside it. Deliver one 3000×3000 file and the maths works downward to 1400, to 640, to the 64px tile in a search result, with no decision left to make.

Downsampling is also the safe direction. Reducing a 3000px image to 1400px throws away information the renderer no longer needs; enlarging a 1400px image to 3000px invents information that was never captured, and it looks exactly like what it is. That asymmetry is the whole argument for working large, and for keeping the master alongside the delivered file.

If you are printing as well as streaming, ignore 3000 and work back from the physical size instead: the print resolution and the sleeve dimensions set the pixel count, and a 12-inch sleeve needs considerably more than 3000px at press resolution.

The square is not a suggestion

Every major service renders cover art in a fixed 1:1 tile. A rectangular file does not get a special layout — it gets cropped or padded by a system that has no idea which part of your design matters.

This bites hardest when the artwork started life somewhere else. A CD booklet front, a vinyl gatefold, a poster crop: all of them arrive at square through a decision someone has to make, and it should be you, in your own file, before a distributor's automatic fix makes it for you. DistroKid says as much — rectangular artwork is adjusted automatically, "but there's a risk that our fixed version won't look exactly as you intended."

Crop it yourself, then look at the result at 64 pixels. That is the size at which most people will first meet it, in a search result or a queue, and a composition that only reads at full size is a composition that mostly does not read.

The colour profile trap

This is the failure nobody expects, because the file looks perfect on your own machine.

Spotify wants artwork "encoded with an sRGB color space, 24bits per pixel, with color profiles applied directly" — and does not support embedded colour profiles. "Applied directly" is the key phrase. If you design in Adobe RGB or Display P3 and export with the profile merely tagged, a renderer that ignores the tag reads your saturated numbers as sRGB numbers and the result comes back dull and shifted. Convert to sRGB on export — do not merely assign it — and flatten the profile into the pixels.

The same category of problem produces sideways covers. A photograph carries EXIF orientation, which most editors honour silently; strip that metadata on export and the pixels themselves must already be the right way up.

Where we disagree with the usual advice

The standard line is bigger is always better. It isn't, and treating it as a rule produces two real problems.

The first is upscaling. Once "3000×3000" is read as a target instead of a description of a well-made file, the tempting move is to resample whatever you have up to the number. Spotify tells you not to, and of everything on that page it is the only line phrased as an instruction, not a spec. A file that is genuinely 1400px of detail is better artwork than the same file stretched to 3000.

The second is format. "Export the biggest possible PNG" is common advice, and a 3000×3000 24-bit PNG of a photographic cover can run to tens of megabytes for no visible gain, while some distributors accept JPG only — DistroKid asks for .jpg. The useful rule is narrower than "bigger": PNG for flat colour, gradients and type; JPG at maximum quality for photographic artwork; check your distributor's accepted formats before you decide.

What actually goes on the cover

The dimension spec is the easy half. Apple's content rules are the part that gets releases bounced: artwork must not be "blurry, pixelated, mismatched, misaligned, or rotated" unless that is clearly deliberate, must not be misleading about who is on the record, and must not carry marketing content, competitor references, URLs, logos or promotional dates.

That last group is worth reading twice. Your social handle, your label's website, a "out now" banner and a release date are all normal things to want on a piece of promotional art, and all of them belong on the promotional art rather than on the sleeve. The cover is a catalogue asset that will still be sitting in someone's library in five years, when the date is meaningless and the URL may not resolve.

For everything after the file spec — what the image should actually be — album cover ideas works through the approaches, and how to make an album cover covers the process end to end.

The export checklist

• 3000×3000, square, no upscaling from a smaller original.
• sRGB, converted and not assigned, profile flattened into the pixels.
• Metadata stripped — no embedded ICC profile, no EXIF orientation.
• One image file, not a multi-page layout.
• No URLs, handles, logos, dates or marketing copy in the artwork.
• Checked at 64px as well as at full size.

Once the file is right, the cover has settled more of your release than you might think — the palette, the light and the world are all decided. Turning that into a music video is mostly a matter of writing those decisions down, and the full video workflow picks up from there. If you also need the moving-image specs, the Spotify Canvas dimensions are a separate and much stranger set of numbers.

Frequently asked questions

What size should an album cover be?+

3000×3000 pixels, square, sRGB. That is Apple Music's recommended size and it is the largest number any major store publishes as a recommendation, so a single 3000px master downsamples cleanly to satisfy every other requirement below it. Nothing is gained by going higher unless you are also printing the artwork, where the sleeve size and print resolution set the number instead.

What is the minimum album cover size?+

The minimum depends on where you are delivering. Apple Music's floor is 1400×1400. Bandcamp asks for at least 1400×1400. DistroKid's minimum is 1000×1000. Spotify accepts down to 640px square. A distributor sends your art to all of them at once, so the practical minimum is the strictest one in the chain — treat 1400×1400 as the true floor and 3000×3000 as the working size.

Do album covers have to be square?+

Yes. Every major streaming service renders cover art in a fixed 1:1 tile, so a rectangular file is either cropped or padded by someone other than you. If your design started life as a jewel-case booklet or a vinyl gatefold, crop it to square deliberately and check that nothing important sits in the discarded strip.

What file format should album art be?+

JPG or PNG covers every case. Spotify accepts TIFF, PNG or JPG; Apple accepts JPEG or PNG at 100% quality; DistroKid asks for .jpg; Bandcamp does not publish a format requirement. PNG is the safer choice for flat colour, gradients and type because JPEG compression puts visible artefacts around hard edges — but check your distributor's own limit, since some accept JPG only.

Why does my album art keep getting rejected?+

The three common causes are upscaling, metadata and content. Spotify explicitly says not to upscale images, and a 600px file blown up to 3000px is obvious at review. Spotify also does not support embedded colour profiles or orientation metadata, so an untagged export rotated by EXIF can arrive sideways. And Apple prohibits URLs, logos, marketing text and promotional dates in the artwork itself.

Does album cover resolution affect streaming quality?+

No — the audio and the artwork are separate files, and cover resolution has no effect on how a track sounds. What it does affect is how the release looks in a listener's library at large tile sizes, on a TV or car display, and on a Now Playing screen where the art fills most of the frame. That is a presentation decision, not an audio one.

The cover is finished. The video is the next three minutes.

Melodious reads your song's structure, storyboards it shot by shot and generates the keyframes in one run — so the video comes out of the same world as the sleeve.

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