FAQs for Creators: Labels, Artists and Designers
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Sleevenote is a platform for delivering album art for streamed music releases. As well as being the only music platform to show additional artwork, Sleevenote's unique feature is embedded track buttons within the tracklist artwork.
Check out these great examples of albums on Sleevenote:
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A Sleevenote version shows off your album art. It gives you a platform to express an artist and album's unique identity for your streaming service listeners. 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 Sleevenote release page presents your full album artwork alongside music playback, and links to, multiple streaming platforms. Sleevenote supports Apple Music, Spotify Premium and TIDAL, with more to come.
Artwork is laid out either horizontally (for desktop) or vertically (for portrait mobile devices)
A compelling destination for promoting your releases, in the form of shareable direct links to an online web player. Links support media cards across all platforms
View your releases in your Sleevenote dashboard, where more features will be coming soon.
Sleevenote is based around a highly compatible “square panel” format for album art, making reformatting from vinyl, and 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.
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.
Typically within 24hrs, if you submit between GMT 8am-8pm and it is urgent email support@sleevenote.com
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. To discuss upcoming releases email us.
Yes, creating a Sleevenote version of your release is free. We've built an easy-to-use Design Tool for it.
At some point we may introduce additional paid "pro" features if valuable to creators. Do you have some feature requests? email us.
Providing full artwork is a way to entice fans into an experience that you visually control, letting fans read credits, lyrics and anything else you wish to accompany your release. Providing easy access to an immersive artwork-lead experience will strengthen listeners' connections with your identity, create bigger fans of your listeners, lead to more streams, music purchases and more.
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 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).
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” (driving streams and a deeper fan-connection for) your release.
It was likely added by our community or in-house team, from content found online. You should notice that the artwork is very faithful and likely lovingly cleaned up to look its best. This is done with the utmost respect to the original material and intended to celebrate and spread the word of the art form.
As a rightsholder you can replace the artwork with your own official artwork via the Design Tool, select the "official" checkbox (which we confirm) 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 have this in our detailed Terms.
At the moment we are accepting unofficial submissions. We are keen to embrace fans and design enthusiasts submitting artwork, everything on the database goes through approval by our artwork-loving team, and needs to be of a high standard. To upload head on over to our Design Tool. Leave the "official" check box unchecked. As above, artwork may be transferred, updated or removed by the rights holder, more info in our detailed Terms.
We'd love to hear from you
support@sleevenote.com