How to Make a Spotify Canvas: Size, Specs and Upload

A Spotify Canvas is a 3–8 second vertical loop that replaces your album art in the Now Playing view of the Spotify mobile app. Spotify publishes exactly four technical rules for it — MP4 or JPG, 3–8 seconds long, a vertical 9:16 ratio, and between 720px and 1080px tall — and nothing else. There is no published codec, bitrate, frame-rate, file-size or audio rule. Make a file that satisfies those four, add it per track in Spotify for Artists, and you are done.

The spec confusion is real, and most of it comes from that last line. This guide gives you the published rules, the reasons uploads actually fail, and the exact upload path — with a link to Spotify's own documentation at every point where we state a requirement.

What is a Spotify Canvas?

Spotify describes a Canvas as a short vertical loop that takes the place of your cover art in the Now Playing view of the Spotify mobile app (Adding a Canvas, Spotify for Artists, checked September 2026). It is set per track, not per release, so a ten-song album can have ten different Canvases — or one on the single and none on the rest.

Three things people expect a Canvas to be, that it is not:

• It is not a music video. It is a few seconds long and it loops forever while the track plays. There is no beginning or end to write.
• It does not carry its own audio. Your song is the audio. Spotify's own guidance is to pick footage with nobody talking, singing or rapping in it — at three to eight seconds, lip-sync is not going to line up with the lyrics.
• It does not play in time with your song. Spotify loops it on its own clock. Nothing you can put in the file will make the loop land on your downbeat inside the app.

That last point matters when you read tools that promise "beat-synced" Canvases. What a beat-aware loop can honestly do is make the motion inside the loop carry the same pulse as the record, so it does not visibly fight the music. It cannot phase-lock to playback, because Spotify does not expose that.

Spotify Canvas size and specs

This is the whole published spec, from Spotify's Canvas guidelines (checked September 2026):

Source: Spotify for Artists, Canvas guidelines — verified September 2026. Specs change; re-check the source before you rely on it.

The "720px – 1080px tall" line, decoded

This is the single most confusing sentence in the spec, and it is worth being honest about: read literally against 9:16 it does not work. A 9:16 frame that is 1080 px tall is 607.5 px wide, which is not a whole pixel count and is below any sensible Canvas resolution. A vertical frame that is 1080 px on its short edge is 1920 px tall.

Every working Canvas in the wild, and every tool that produces accepted files, resolves it the same way: 720–1080 refers to the short edge. So the two safe exports are:

• 1080×1920 — the standard, and what you should use unless you have a reason not to.
• 720×1280 — smaller file, still inside the range, useful if your export is running heavy.

Anything above 1080×1920 is over the top of the published range and gets rejected. Anything narrower than 720 px is under the bottom of it. And anything that is not 9:16 — a 4:5 crop, a 1:1 square, a 1920×1080 landscape clip someone rotated in a phone app — fails on ratio regardless of how many pixels it has.

What Spotify says about the content itself

The guidelines also carry taste rules that no file checker can test for. In summary: avoid rapid cuts and intense flashing; expect the edges of the frame to be cropped on some phone screens, so keep anything important away from them; and consider leaving your song title and artist name off the video, because the Spotify app already prints both directly underneath it. Spotify offers three loop shapes as a way to think about the motion — a continuous seamless loop, a hard cut with a deliberate edit point, or a rebound that plays forwards then reverses.

Why Spotify Canvas uploads get rejected

Spotify's own upload-error page is blunt about the cause: if the length or the size is even slightly off, the upload can fail, and it tells you to confirm the specs with a media tool or an online checker before trying again (Fix a Spotify Canvas upload error, checked September 2026). Here is what "slightly off" turns out to mean in practice.

1. The file is not really an MP4

This is the most common one and the easiest to miss, because the filename lies to you. Renaming clip.webm to clip.mp4 does not convert anything — the bytes are still WebM, and an uploader that reads the bytes rather than the extension will reject it. Firefox's canvas recorder writes WebM. So do a lot of screen recorders and browser-based editors. A MOV out of a phone or an editor is also not an MP4, whatever it looks like in Finder.

2. It is exactly 8.000 seconds

8 seconds is the published maximum, so an 8.000 s file should pass. Artists repeatedly report that it does not, and that trimming a few frames off fixes it — most likely a boundary comparison somewhere in the pipeline. Spotify does not publish anything about this, so treat it as a widely reported behaviour rather than a rule: land at 7.9 s or below and the question never comes up.

3. There is an audio track in the file

Spotify publishes no rule about audio at all — which is exactly why it is worth removing the variable. A Canvas plays silently under your song; an embedded audio track does nothing for you and is a commonly reported upload failure. Export video-only: no audio track, not a muted one.

4. The pixels are sideways with a rotation flag on top

Phone footage and some editors store landscape pixels plus a 90° rotation flag in the track header, or a JPG stored on its side with an EXIF orientation tag. Your player honours the flag and shows it upright; a transcoder that ignores the flag sees a landscape video. Re-export with genuinely vertical pixels rather than relying on the tag.

5. It is the wrong shape or the wrong size

4:5, 1:1, 16:9, 1440×2560, 540×960 — all common, all outside the published spec. Check the number, do not eyeball it.

6. The web uploader is having a bad day

Spotify's own advice, when a file that meets the specs still fails, is to use the Spotify for Artists mobile app instead, and to reinstall it if you already have it. It is a separate upload path, and it is worth one attempt before you start re-exporting a file that was fine all along.

If you already have a file and want to know which of these applies to it, our Canvas checker reads the actual bytes of the file in your browser — container, real format, displayed size, duration, track count, codec, rotation flag — and tells you which rows fail and why. It never uploads the file, and it cannot promise Spotify will accept it, only that it meets the published spec.

Making a loop that actually loops

A Canvas plays over and over for as long as someone stays on the track. A join you would never notice once becomes the only thing you can see by the fifth pass. There are two honest ways to handle it, and Spotify names both.

• Continuous loop. The last frame flows into the first with no visible step. This is the hardest to fake and the best to watch.
• Hard cut. A deliberate edit point that reads as intentional. Perfectly legitimate — just make it look like a decision rather than an accident.

Cross-fading the end of a clip back over its start is the usual trick, and it is also why so many Canvases have a soft, ghosted moment once per loop. A loop that is built to close — every moving element driven by a cyclic clock, so the final frame is the frame before the first — has no join to hide.

Why bar length beats "pick a number of seconds"

Here is the part almost nobody does. If your track runs at 120 BPM, one 4/4 bar lasts 2 seconds. A 4-second loop is exactly 2 bars; a 5-second loop is 2.5 bars, so the motion restarts halfway through a bar and drifts against the record every single time round. At 140 BPM a bar is about 1.71 s, so 2 bars is 3.43 s and 4 bars is 6.86 s — both comfortably inside the 3–8 s window, and neither is a round number of seconds.

Cutting the loop to a whole number of your track's bars is what makes a Canvas feel like it belongs to the song instead of running next to it. To be precise about what this does and does not buy you: Spotify still loops the Canvas on its own clock, so it will not start on your downbeat. What it fixes is the internal rhythm — the pulse inside the loop matches the pulse of the record.

The arithmetic is bars × 240 ÷ BPM seconds for 4/4. Anything that lands between 3 and 7.9 works.

How to add a Canvas in Spotify for Artists

There is no public Canvas API, so no tool — including ours — can post it for you. You add it yourself. Spotify documents two paths (Adding a Canvas):

1. On the web: log in at artists.spotify.com, go to Music, select the track, and click Add Canvas.
2. In the app: open the Spotify for Artists mobile app, tap Music, select the track, and tap Canvas.

Who is allowed to add one

Spotify publishes three eligibility conditions, and hitting a wall here is usually a permissions problem rather than a file problem:

• You need an Admin or Editor role on that artist's Spotify for Artists team.
• The artist must be the first main artist on the track — a featured artist cannot add a Canvas to someone else's track.
• The artist must be a main artist on both the track and the release.

You can add a Canvas to any track, including one that has not come out yet — which means the visual can be ready on release day rather than a week after it.

Why your Canvas is not showing

A Canvas that uploaded fine and still is not visible is almost always one of the reasons Spotify lists on its Canvas not showing page (checked September 2026):

• You are not on mobile. Canvas plays only in the Spotify mobile app — not on desktop, not in the web player.
• The app or OS is too old. Spotify lists iOS 12 or later and Android 6.0 or later.
• Data Saver is on. It suppresses Canvas. It lives in the app's data-saving and offline settings.
• Canvas is switched off in settings. There is a Canvas toggle under content and display settings.
• Split rights. If rights to a track are split, you can only add a Canvas to the versions you own.
• Region. Canvas is available in a defined list of countries; listeners outside them do not see it.

Check it on a phone, with Data Saver off, on the version of the track you actually own, before you assume the file is wrong.

Make one in your browser, free

Our Spotify Canvas Maker exists because the two hard parts of this — a loop that genuinely closes, and a file that genuinely meets the spec — are both things software should do for you.

• The loop is cut to a whole number of bars. Give it the tempo of the track and it fits whole bars into the 3–8 second window, so the motion carries the record's pulse. Bar counts that cannot fit tell you why instead of quietly changing to something else.
• It closes by construction. Each look runs on a cyclic clock, so the last frame flows into the first rather than being cross-faded over it — and the page measures the join and prints the score it got, so you are not taking our word for it.
• It writes a real 1080×1920 MP4. Full size, H.264, one video track and no audio track. The preview you tweak is drawn by the same renderer at the same aspect ratio.
• It never goes above 7.9 seconds. The 8.000 s edge case simply cannot happen.
• The finished file is read back and checked. Not your settings echoed at you — the actual exported bytes, parsed by the same engine as the Canvas checker. The badge appears only if that parse earns it.
• Nothing is uploaded and there is no watermark on any tier. Everything renders and encodes on your device, there is no account, and no version of the file carries a mark.

Two honest limits. Firefox cannot write H.264 MP4 from a canvas, so on Firefox the page tells you at load and offers a still JPG instead — which Spotify also accepts — rather than handing you a WebM wearing an .mp4 name. And a green result means the file meets Spotify's published spec; Spotify also reviews content and does not publish everything it enforces, so nobody can promise you acceptance.

If your song is not mastered yet, do that first — TrackGleam masters it in the browser too, with nothing uploaded. And if what you actually want is a longer clip for Reels or TikTok rather than a Canvas, that is a different shape and a different tool: see turning a song into a video.

Make a Canvas free — in your browser, nothing uploaded