You Can Now Create Your Own Playlist on Spotify
You now have more options when it comes to adding a personal touch to your Spotify playlist cover, with a new cover maker tool coming to the Android and iOS mobile apps that lets you create custom artistic designs from images, text, and stickers.
This feature is currently officially in beta and is available to free and premium users in many countries (try closing and restarting the app if it doesn’t show up). “We’re giving music fans the ability to create and customize their own playlist covers so their playlists always look as good as they sound,” says Spotify.
Spotify has put a lot of effort into this too, with the streaming service enlisting artists like Clairo, Jamie xx and Arlo Parks to create custom playlists and accompanying artwork, and enlisting professional designers to create some of the imagery and sticker options you can use. I’ll look in the app.
The custom cover works alongside the existing option that allows you to add a custom image to illustrate your playlist. If you’d rather create something unique inside the Spotify app itself, now it’s possible.
How to Create Your Own Spotify Cover Art
The process works the same whether you’re using Android or iOS: Find the playlist for which you want to edit the artwork, open it in the app, then tap the three dots above the track list. From the menu, select Create Cover .
Then you have two options: “Create Cover” (this is a new feature) and “Change Cover Image” (this was already an option). Select the latter and you can choose a photo from your phone’s gallery or take a new photo to illustrate the playlist with. The app will crop your image to size.
However, here we want to select Create Cover , which launches the art editor. First, you’ll see a basic placeholder and four tabs at the bottom of the screen to help you create your creative masterpiece.
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Text allows you to place text on top of an image. By default, the title of the playlist is displayed, but you can add any text in multiple blocks. Each block can have its own font size and style, and there are some effects to play with (like spherical text).
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Image allows you to insert an image from your phone’s gallery or take a new photo using the camera. This image can be cropped to a specific shape, resized, rotated and moved, and again, there are effects to play with (like fisheye).
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The background is where you can change what’s underneath the text and images you’ve loaded on top – the default will be a simple color gradient, but you can adjust it as needed or switch to a solid color. If you need inspiration, use the shuffle button.
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Stickers work exactly as you’d expect, offering a selection of little icons and graphics to decorate what you’ve made. There aren’t a lot of stickers available, although presumably we might see Spotify add to the mix over time (it’s a beta, after all).
When you’re happy with how everything looks, click Save and Save again to apply the artwork. As far as I can tell, at the moment you can’t go back to the original playlist cover (filled with album art from the tracks you selected), although you can of course create something new to overwrite it.
Keep in mind that you can’t save draft covers as you work—you’ll need to either apply the design or start over—and you can’t store multiple cover options for a playlist (so if you want to apply a new cover but keep the old one, You will need to take a screenshot of it first).