Like many, I enjoy creating custom playlists on both Apple Music (for myself) and on Spotify (for my friends). Making nice playlist cover art is a fun part of this process, but I’ve found both Apple Music and Spotify’s built-in tools lacking. Apple Music lets you select photos from your library or pick a generated cover. Spotify also lets you pick a photo you’ve saved, and it has a cover generator feature in beta that offers greater control over the background, elements in the image, and the text. Apple’s cover options become repetitive to me quite quickly, while I find it takes too long to make good covers using Spotify’s editor. This is why I’ve been relying on Denim, an app that lets you make custom playlist covers for both Apple Music and Spotify.
Denim’s been around for a couple of years now, and it recently got a big update that added support for Spotify. Its developer also made Hezel, which lets you back up all of your Apple Music playlists.
How to make custom Apple Music, Spotify playlist covers with Denim
When you open Denim, the app will ask for access to your Apple Music and Spotify data. This is required for the app to see your playlists and help you generate cover art for them. Once you’ve granted it the proper permissions, the app will show you all your playlists when you tap the + button in the top-right corner. You’ll see your playlists sorted in two neat tabs—Apple Music and Spotify. Note that Denim only lets you customize playlist covers for playlists that you have personally created. It doesn’t show Apple or Spotify’s editorial or algorithmic playlists, or playlists created by others.
This makes it easy to find your playlists with stale cover art. That saved me a lot of trouble, because I have around 200 playlists on my Apple Music account, including around 50 that I’ve created. To start creating a cover, tap any of your playlists and Denim will generate a whole bunch of covers to start from. There is a good variety of basic covers with a solid background color, and some with gradients, patterns, or textures in the background. As far as I can tell, there’s no AI in use here, with Denim instead occasionally adding new artwork manually, such as the patterns designed by Daniel Baketaric.
Credit: Pranay Parab
I like the Denim covers that prominently display an artist from my playlist. Another personal favorite is the emoji cover, which looks at the region and genre of music and picks emoji based on those factors. You may see the flag of the country that songs are from and some instruments commonly used in the songs. But the real fun begins when you go to the Explore More section. This lets you see covers that are based on moods, scenes, genres, activities, seasons, and much more.
Denim is a free download, and it allows you to create many types of playlist covers without paying. The app has no ads, either. There is a Pro tier that is home to a few additional cover and editing options, though, and you’ll need it even to edit free covers. Denim Pro is available at $4.99 per year or a one-time in-app purchase of $19.99. This gives you access to editing options including changing the font, the background, and the text on the cover.
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