#Itunes larger album art view full

Full abbreviations are okay, but not partial abbreviations (for instance, “ATM” is fine, but not “AT Machine”). If you entered “Blueprints” as the album name, it can’t say “The Blueprint” on the cover art.

The text on your cover art needs to exactly match the info you entered for your release (artist name, title of the album or single, etc.). Q: Does the text on my art need to match the metadata exactly?Ī: Yes. Every single release should have a unique cover, so as someone scrolls through your discography they can identify each release by the cover alone. Q: Do the covers for each of my releases need to be unique?Ī: Yes. Here are the most commonly asked questions about cover art: It’s just one of the many reasons to distribute music with us. Our knowledge of these rules ensures your music goes live and stays live. Artwork is the most common hangup for artists when submitting their music. How does CD Baby know these rules? Because we’ve been successfully distributing music to dozens of platforms for over 15 years, and those platforms send us their submission guidelines. Yes, even in the ever-changing realm of digital music, there are rules to follow if you want your music available where people can access it. It’s about creating a good experience for fans, avoiding things that could be confusing, incorrect, or offensive, and making sure your cover art is an invitation to your music, not a warning sign that listeners should turn around and listen to someone else. They’re in place to protect all parties involved (you, your distributor, your listeners, and the music platforms). Keep in mind, these rules aren’t about limiting your creativity. Later in this article we’ll show you a super easy (and cheap!) way to design your own art, but before you start on that we’ll explain the digital platforms’ artwork guidelines, so you know exactly what to include and what to avoid. But how do I make good cover art without spending a bunch of money? The guidelines listed below are in place to encourage a good user experience, and to avoid misleading or confusing info on cover artwork. The digital platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) demand artwork that is at the very least legible and consistent with their guidelines.

Why not wrap it in a pretty package?īut don’t just take our word for it. If you’re scrolling through Spotify looking for new tunes, are you going to click on an artist who couldn’t be bothered to represent their work with something at least professional, if not eye-catching? Or are you going to queue a song whose art looks like an MS Paint experiment gone wrong?Īnd for your own music: you put all the hard work into creating it. Modern listeners are given more options for music consumption than ever before. Thing is, it’s still that way today.Įven in the age of endless listening for all, the cover you choose for your single or album plays an essential role in representing your music before someone even clicks “play.” Heck, having professional-looking cover art might be even more important now than it was in the physical media days of yore. Dre’s The Chronic, featuring a portrait of Dre framed in a design similar to the Zig-Zag rolling papers he used to wrap his album’s namesake.įor all these classic albums and hundreds more, the cover art is a window into the music therein. Īnd we can’t forget the endlessly imitated cover of Dr. Similarly, Joy Division’s choice of a simple data plot visualization of radio pulsar signals centered against a black background was a perfect representation for the stark, cold post-punk sound on Unknown Pleasures. One glance at the Schizoid Man on the cover of King Crimson’s landmark prog debut In the Court of the Crimson King and you know you’re in for a wild ride into the experimental side of rock. Throughout the history of popular music, musicians have chosen to adorn their albums with immediately recognizable covers. Take a look at these covers and tell me you wouldn’t be horrified/intrigued if you came across them among the racks without knowing who the artist was:īut it’s not just Maiden - or even heavy metal - that makes iconic cover art a priority. How many unsuspecting teens in the ‘80s stumbled onto Iron Maiden in a store and bought The Number of the Beast or Piece of Mind sight unseen and sound unheard due solely to Eddie’s grisly mug staring back at them? Does cover art still matter in a streaming world?īack before streaming and even downloads, when record stores ruled the music world, an album cover was often all a shopper had to go on when they were browsing the shelves.