Spotify Canvas maker.

A Spotify Canvas is the short vertical video, 3 to 8 seconds, that loops behind a track in the Spotify app on phones, in the Now Playing view and the home feeds, in place of the still cover. It has no sound of its own: the song plays over it. Artists add one per track in Spotify for Artists.

Vertical 9:16, between 720 and 1080 pixels tall, 3 to 8 seconds, MP4 or JPG, no audio. Those are the figures on Spotify for Artists' own guidelines. Spotify does not publish a file size, codec or frame rate; the figures that circulate for those are third-party. This tool exports 1080 × 1920 H.264 MP4, silent unless you switch the sound on, at the length you pick.

Anyone with Spotify for Artists access to the track as an Admin or Editor, who is the first main artist on the track or a main artist on both the track and the release. That means the song has to be delivered through a distributor and the profile claimed. Upcoming releases can carry a Canvas before they go live.

Spotify advises against it: the title and the artist name are already on screen under the Canvas. Leave the Title and Artist fields empty here and the styles render without them. The content policy also rules out URLs, ticket vendors, follow or like calls to action, promotion of other songs, products or brands, and the Spotify logo; anything explicit has to be marked.

Spotify's own help page says an upload fails if the length or size is even slightly off, and artists report compliant files rejected with "wrong ratio" or "file is too small" and accepted a day later. Two things help, according to Spotify and the forum threads: upload through the Spotify for Artists mobile app rather than the website, and make sure the file has no audio track: here that means leaving Sound on Silent file, the default.

Spotify's own 2019 metrics guide said a high-quality Canvas increased streams by up to 120 percent and saves by up to 114 percent, with lifts in profile visits and shares. The higher share figures that circulate come from an artist email quoted by third parties, not from a Spotify page. Treat the direction as real and the exact numbers as marketing.

Not here. A Canvas template is usually a Photoshop or Premiere file sized 1080 × 1920 with the safe area marked; here the frame is already the Canvas spec, the styles are the templates, and the song itself drives the motion. Keep the middle of the frame clear of anything important: Spotify draws the player controls over the lower part and the title over the lower third.

Spotify plays the loop three ways: continuous, hard cut, or rebound, which runs the clip forward and then backward. A visualizer loop made from 8 seconds of the song will hard cut at the end unless the picture happens to match; rebound hides that. Pick a section with steady motion, a turning record or a breathing halo, and avoid a cut on a big visual event. Or pick Liquid or Glitch: they move the cover itself and return to the still cover every 8 seconds, so an 8 second Canvas loops with no jump at all.