Apple Music’s playlists may not set the world on fire, but if there’s one area in which they’re excellent, it has to be the cover art. We’ve added well over 100 playlists from the service to our library, and sometimes we just can’t stop ogling at the artwork. We’ve also made a few playlists on Apple Music, but the album art for our own playlists is not nearly as good.
That’s why we’re going to show you how to create amazing "Apple-style" playlist covers for your Apple Music playlists. You don't have to be a creative expert either; we'll cover websites to help you easily design free covers, as well as borrow from others' work.
1. CoverX
CoverX is a website that makes it very easy to create beautiful Apple Music covers. It features a set of gradient backgrounds that look like Apple’s official playlist covers, apart from some backgrounds from free stock photo website, Unsplash. CoverX also allows you to pick your own backgrounds.
Once you’ve done that, you can add up to four lines of text. This includes your username or the Apple Music logo, the playlist title, sub-title, and one line of text describing what the playlist is about. You can choose to omit any or all of the four lines of text, which allows you a greater degree of freedom when designing your covers.
You can download these covers as JPEG or PNG files, and upload them easily to Apple Music.
A word of caution though: If you intend to share your playlists with friends on Apple Music, you might want to avoid using the Apple Music logo. CoverX warns that these covers may get removed for your friends if you do that. It may be better to send the cover image separately via email or a messaging app, along with a link to your playlist.
2. Denim
Denim is an iOS app that has a wider variety of backgrounds that you can quickly customize to make your next great playlist cover. Denim has basic gradient backgrounds, but it also offers several other types of presets that you can quickly customize. Note that Denim doesn’t allow you to add as much text as CoverX, but this works well with the kind of covers you can create on this app.
Once you’re done creating cover art on Denim, you can save the image and tap a button in the app to open Apple Music. It’s a small feature, but it definitely makes the process of adding playlist covers feel smoother.
While the app does allow you to use around 20 backgrounds for free, Denim’s best backgrounds cost $1.99 to unlock. Denim supports both Apple Music and Spotify.
Download: Denim (Free, premium version available)
3. Playlist Cover Art Generator
Not everyone wants artistic cover art for their Apple Music playlists. Some people will prefer seeing a simple collage of album art from various songs on the playlist.
You can get this done very easily via the Playlist Cover Art Generator shortcut. To use it, you will need to download Apple’s Shortcuts app and ensure that Allow Untrusted Shortcuts is enabled under Settings > Shortcuts on your iOS device.
When you open the Shortcuts app and run Playlist Cover Art Generator, it’ll ask you to pick the playlist from Apple Music, how many images you want on the playlist cover, and if you want to add some text on the cover.
The shortcut supports up to 49 images, which is a 7x7 grid, provided your playlist has songs from those many albums. We noticed that the collage usually looks better without text, but your experience may differ.
If an album cover isn’t available as a perfectly square image, Playlist Cover Art Generator won’t use it in the collage. Another thing to note is that once the shortcut has completed its task, it automatically saves it to your iOS photo library. The shortcut doesn’t send a notification stating that it’s done its job, which can be a little confusing.
4. Design Your Own Apple Music Cover Art From Scratch
So far we’ve covered services that make it easy to create Apple Music cover art. However, if you’d like a little more control over how your playlists look, you can design your own album art.
For Apple Music, you’ll need square images to get this job done. As long as it’s high-resolution (1000x1000 pixels works nicely) and designed well, your cover art will look nice on most Apple devices.
If you want some ideas, you can head over to Colorful Gradients Tumblr page for gradient background-related inspiration. You might also want to check out interesting Pinterest pages that feature Apple Music playlist covers or even Spotify playlist art.
Bonus: How to Download Apple Music Album Art and Playlist Covers
Creating Apple Music playlist covers may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Some of us would simply like to download Apple’s awesome playlist covers and use them with our playlists. Luckily, there is a very simple method to download those. iOS developer Ben Dodson has created a website that lets you find and download any Apple Music playlist cover.
Head over to the Apple Music Artwork Finder page, paste the link to any Apple Music playlist, and hit Get the artwork. Now you’ll see the playlist cover displayed just below that. You may scroll down further to download high-resolution versions of the same image (1000x1000 pixels and the highest resolution of 3840x3840 pixels are both usually available).
If you aren’t sure how to find an Apple Music playlist link, just open the playlist, tap the three-dot menu, and hit Copy. Now just paste this link in the website mentioned above.
Let the (Apple) Music Play
Apple Music’s playlist recommendations may not be the best in the business, but its cover art is absolutely stunning. For those who love playlist covers as much as they love the songs in their library, Apple Music may be a great choice for a streaming service.