Create striking album and single cover art with AI. Spotify and Apple Music specs, genre-driven prompt formulas, and distributor rules for 2026 releases.
Every release needs artwork. Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud — none of them will take your track without a cover, and in an endless scroll of releases, the cover is your one visual shot at a stranger's attention. Professional album art costs $200 to $2,000 per release, which made sense when artists released one album every two years. It makes no sense in the singles-every-month economy that streaming created.
That is why AI album cover generators have become part of the standard release workflow for independent musicians in 2026. This guide covers the specs distributors enforce, prompt formulas by genre, and the policy questions that trip up first-time releases.
Distributors (DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, UnitedMasters) enforce the platforms' requirements: