FAQs for Creators: Labels, Artists and Designers
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A platform for delivering album art alongside the digital/online listening experience.
Sleevenote augments existing music delivery with additional visual content, intended to work across multiple platforms, it supports Apple Music, Spotify and more to come.
A Sleevenote version shows off your album art. It gives you a platform to express an artist and album's unique identity for digital. It can encourage interest, engagement and keep listeners coming back to your releases. It will forge a stronger bond with listeners, leading to greater support for the music.
A compelling destination for promoting your releases, in the form of shareable direct links to an online web player:
"Listen to the new album here player.sleevenote.com/yourlink"
We support media cards on most patforms.
Custom features and statistics will be coming soon.
Sleevenote is based around a highly compatible “square panel” format for album art, making reformatting from vinyl, and general booklet art easy. Essentially it involves delivering additional square imagery at a good quality resolution via our Design Tool.
We provide best practice Guidelines to get the most out of your designs, which may involve a small amount of reformatting and editing, but ultimately you are encouraged to be creative.
Check out these great examples of albums on Sleevenote:
Run The Jewels “RTJ4" (Jewel Runners)
Avalanches "We Will Always Love You" (Modular)
When you are ready head over to our Design Tool.
We'd suggest including a “version for Sleevenote” in the checklist for your designer, simply send them to our Design Tool which links to our Guidelines. Releases can be added once they are available on Apple Music (in full or pre-release form).
Minimal work is needed at the point of artwork creation, although it is also a great opportunity to create exclusive special artwork. Otherwise anyone with medium level digital artworking skills (in Photoshop / Illustrator / InDesign) will be able to follow our Guidelines and use the Design Tool.
Generally it is a platform for albums, but any release that has extra artwork other than cover art is welcome. Start with albums you are currently promoting or are about to promote. Releases need to be available on Apple Music (in full or pre-release form). Albums with particularly awesome album art! Head over to our Design Tool.
Yes, creating a Sleevenote version of your release is free. We've built an easy-to-use Design Tool for it.
We keep a close eye on digital music consumption behaviours and at this point we believe that paywalling artwork is not the way to go, rather it is a way to entice fans into an experience that you visually control. Providing easy access to an immersive artwork-lead experience will strengthen listeners' connections with your albums, create bigger fans of your listeners, lead to more streams, music purchases (to enjoy in our apps) and more. We will always be exploring ways to create additional income for creators. If you'd like to talk to us about ideas, email us.
Album art is protected by copyright and always remains the property of its owner(s). The owner is typically a label, but can also be the artist or body that commissioned the work, or even the designer depending on the agreements and licenses in place.
By providing artwork to us you grant a non-exclusive license to distribute your artwork. More detailed Terms are here.
We do not charge a user for access to your artwork alongside a user's license to listen to the audio, which already includes access the cover artwork, typically provided in the music platforms end-user-license agreement (for example Apple Music). Artwork is only ever supplied alongside either access to the album (for example an Apple Music subscription), or in direct promotion of the album (for example linking to the album on Apple Music).
Sleevenote owns the underlying technology used to create an “interactive” experience (the code that adds “play buttons” on your artwork) and the intellectual property of the delivery methods (user interface, user experience and creator tools). We may charge to make our underlying technology and access to the database available to 3rd parties to improve the service and create partnerships with platforms in order to widen the accessibility to your content via an API, which we fully control to protect your property and keep the quality of service to the highest and most reliable level.
Think of us similarly to the printer of your vinyl artwork. We are reproducing it for you to allow you to add value to “selling” (including streaming) your release.
It was likely added by our community or in-house team, from content found online.
We embrace fans and design enthusiasts submitting artwork (think Discogs), everything on the database goes through approval by our artwork-loving team, and needs to be of a high standard, you should notice that the artwork is very faithful and likely lovingly cleaned up to look its best.
In addition our users can “request” artwork (a good sign) which our in-house design team tracks down from available artwork online. This is done with the utmost respect to the original material and intended to celebrate and spread the word of the art form.
At this point you can replace the artwork with your own official artwork via the Design Tool, and we can then “lock” it for you, meaning that no further public submissions can happen on that artwork, and only you can update it. (You need to sign up with an account on the Design Tool so we know who to authorise for certain releases).
If you would like artwork removed we can remove it immediately and it will be removed from all devices and destinations, just email us. We would however encourage you to leave up fan submitted artwork for listeners to enjoy, increasing your streams and attention, while replacement artwork is being prepared. At no point would your artwork have been exploited financially.
We'd love to hear from you creatorsupport@sleevenote.com