Cover Art Requirements
1. Quality of images. The Cover art must not be any of the following: blurry, pixelated, mismatched, misaligned, rotated, incorrect, or have other quality issues.
2. Links and webpages. The cover art must not contain website addresses, websites that sell music, mention to social media, logos of any store or services related to entertainment, mention to phisical formats, or any external reference of the digital release.
3. Credits and collaborations. The cover art can include Credit or other artist’s names who are not the primary artist of the release, always in a precise form and without any type of abbreviattion. The introduced information in the cover will have to be reproduced with extreme precision in the metadata and vice versa.
And, similarly, expressions like “all rights reserved” – or equivalent – cannot be used. Not even other redundant or unnecessary information.
The release reference number can appear in the cover, but not the release’s UPC or any track’s ISRC codes.
4. Tracklisting and illegible texts. The cover art must not contain track listing, as the image will be generally visualized in small formats and it won’t be able to appreciate small size texts.
In general, is recommended to use legible fonts in the cover, specially for the sizing.
5. Descriptions and biographies. The cover art must not include albums’ descriptions, nor artist’s biographies.
6. Telephone or email addresses. The cover art must not contain any telephone number and email addresses.
7. Digital Product. The cover art must not include references to it being a digital product.
8. Pricing. The cover art must not include References to Pricing, nor any information with promotional purposes.
9. Pornography. The cover art must not contain pornography or to do any violence apology, neither a URL of any website that contains or links to pornography content.
10. Misleading information. The cover art must not be misleading. For example, prominently depicting or referencing an artist even though the artist does not perform on the album.
11. Missing Content. The cover art must not contain references to content that the album doesn’t contain, such as “included DVD” or “includes lyrics.”
12. Offensive Symbolism. The cover art must not contain any kind of symbolism that offends a specific group of persons or ethnicities, such as nazi symbolism restricted by the Strafgesetzbuch section 86a.
13. Irrelevant information. The cover art must not include additional information which are irrelevant to the content’s identification, such as album descriptions, artist biography, music genre, instrument with which the album is executed, credits or any text incorporing merely ornamental characters that do not guard an explicit relation with the content.
Preferably in occidental languages contents, it is necessary to avoid the use of extraoccidental or special characters – such as the Asian or Arabic characters, among others – until they guard an explicit, justifiable and coherent relation with the content.
14. Dimensions of cover art. The cover art of all releases must accomplish with all following requirements:
- Proportion: Exactly squared
- Minimum size: 3000 x 3000px
- Maximum size: 5000 x 5000px
- Accepted formats: JPG, TIFF or PNG
- Mode: RGB (CMYK is not acceptable)
- Maximum size of file: 36 MB
The images which do not accomplish with all the above requirement will not be acceptable and may not be shown in the channels.
15. Logos, images and registered brand. Every logo appearing in the cover must be justified in the metadata, including the involved texts. These logos will be accepted if they guard clear relation with the album’s content and explain some relevant information – producer, artist, label, etc. Designers or artists -who created the cover design- mentions won’t be accepted as any other external content that isn’t involved with the release directly.
Any registered brand can appear in the cover, or any other person / company / property images institution. Is totally prohibited the explicit or implicit promotion of them.
Their appearance in the cover will only be accepted if they are visually irrelevant and it can only help to clarify the cover’s intention, and not to promote any product, brand, institution or company.
Note: a company name or logo will be able to appear in the cover and/or in the metadata only if it accomplishes some relevant role in the release (in a musical or/and publishing point of view), and remain justified in the metadata (for example: as a producer or publisher).
In addition, it will be necessary to report documentation to prove the consent of the involved mentioned institution to use its name.