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Check your cover on a phone before you release it
Almost everywhere your cover appears, it is a thumbnail: a square the size of a fingernail in a list, a grid or a notification. Only the release page and Now Playing show it large. So the last check before you upload is not on a big monitor. It is on your phone, at the sizes and in the places the cover will really live. Here are six checks that take about ten minutes.
1. The grid test
Send the cover to your phone and look at it next to the covers already in your music app's library, at the same size. Scroll past it. Then ask: can you tell what it is? Does it stand out from its neighbours, or disappear into them?
What usually fails here is a picture with too much in it. Three subjects at thumbnail size become none. One focal point, one colour flooding the frame and one visible light source hold up at any size, which is why our guide to what a cover should show is built around one colour, one light and one moment.
2. The dark and light test
Open the cover in a dark mode app and in a light one. A cover with a near-black edge melts into a dark player, and a pale cover vanishes against white. Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you have. If the picture loses its edges in the dark, consider whether a touch more light at the border, inside the picture rather than as a frame, keeps it from floating. SoundCloud rejects artwork with uneven borders and TuneCore rejects art squeezed into a corner with white space around it, so fix it in the picture, not around it.
3. The Now Playing test
Open the cover full screen on your phone. That is roughly how Now Playing shows it, with the title and controls below. Then look for:
- A face or subject too close to the bottom edge, where controls will sit.
- Text near any edge. Many players round the corners.
- Anything that only reads when large. If the point of the picture is a detail in the corner, the thumbnail will not carry it.
4. The circle and crop test
Your cover will be cropped or reframed by other people's layouts: a round avatar when it stands in for your profile on Spotify, a wide frame when it goes on YouTube, a tall frame when it stands in for a Canvas or a Short. Imagine a circle in the centre of the square and check what falls outside it. Then imagine the central third as a horizontal strip, and the central third as a vertical one. If the subject survives all three, the cover will travel well. Our guides to the Spotify Canvas and to YouTube show what the tall and wide versions need.
5. The text test
If the cover carries your name or title, zoom out until the picture is thumbnail size. Can you read the text? If not, it is decoration, and you should decide whether it is earning its place. Then zoom in and check the spelling against your release form, letter for letter: a mismatch between the art and the metadata gets a release sent back: TuneCore, CD Baby and SoundCloud all require any text on the art to match your release form exactly. Our text on cover art guide has the store rules.
6. The file test
Open the file's details on your phone, or on a computer, and check four things against the store rules in our sizes guide:
- Square. Width equals height, exactly.
- 3000 by 3000 pixels. Above every distributor minimum we checked and not over the 3000 cap at TuneCore and CD Baby. Apple's artist page asks for 4000, but Apple's asset guide, which distributors deliver against, recommends 3000; our sizes guide explains why 3000 is still the file to send.
- JPG in RGB. Not CMYK, which DistroKid, CD Baby and Apple's asset guide all refuse. DistroKid takes JPG only, and a JPG cannot carry transparency, so saving as JPG settles both.
- The right picture. It sounds obvious, but when a folder holds six versions, it is easy to upload the wrong one. Open the file you are about to upload, not the one you remember.
What to do when a check fails
A cover that fails the grid test usually needs a simpler picture, not a brighter one. A cover that fails the dark test needs light inside the frame. A cover that fails the crop test needs the subject moved toward the centre. A cover that fails the text test is often better with no text at all.
None of these are big changes, and all of them are cheaper before upload than after. Changing a cover once it is delivered takes days to weeks on DistroKid and, on CD Baby, cannot be done at all without cancelling the release and resubmitting it; our release timeline explains why.
In Soundae, every picture in a set is shown to you as a square, and the keep or pass choice is the moment to run these checks: keep the one that reads at a glance, pass the one that only works large. When you keep one, the 3000 by 3000 JPG for the file test is in Download all sizes; Download full size is the 1024 by 1024 PNG master.