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What is Apple Music’s Album Motion Feature?

October 6, 2025
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5 min

Danielle Overdevest

What is Apple Music's Album Motion Feature?

Apple Music launched the album motion feature in December 2020, as a response to Spotify Canvas, which was released the year prior. Since multiple high-tier artists have used it to enhance their fans listening experience and promote their new releases on social media. As result, artists have seen an uptick of up to 30% engagement on socials leading to increased fanbases and streams. But now, thanks to Musixmatch Pro, you don't need to have unlimited funds or a designer at your beck-and-call. This blog aims to explain what Album Motion Artwork is and how you can use it to optimize your music experience on socials, Apple Music and Tidal.

Why is Apple Music Album Motion important for Artists?

As streaming platforms continue to add new features and tools, there are more opportunities for artists to connect and engage with their fans, thereby, enhancing their listening experience and strengthening the artist-to-fan connection. They also optimize your music's visibility and reach providing the possibility of a higher impact.

Benefits of Apple Music Album Motion

Apple Music Album Motion makes album covers look objectively cooler and dynamic and also provides tangible benefits that artists can see not only in their streams but on every platform. When you create Album Motion covers using animated artwork, you get up to 30% more engagement on your social media, increased visibility, more streams, and more content to share with fans who are always looking for new assets from artists.

More Engagement

Engagement drives streams and ultimately attracts fans. When you pair your music with captivating visuals, like album motion artwork covers, you enhance the visual storytelling of your music beyond the static image. While there are specifications for Apple Music album motion and Tidal, you have room to experiment with the texture, motions, and animations of the animated artwork, allowing you to convey even more of the meaning behind your music. You can experiment with the animation style to match the vibe, mood, and energy of your album, and all of this builds into a highly immersive and engaging world through your animated album artwork, which draws listeners in for longer and encourages them to return to your music for more. 

More Visibility

Streaming platforms release these features to provide fans with a better experience, while also ensuring that listeners stay on the platforms for longer. When you capitalize on these desires, you can ensure that your music gets the most visibility possible by becoming a standout artist in terms of the visual content you add to the platform.  Motion artwork has typically been used only by top artists who have the resources to produce the highest-scale professional releases. Still, you can easily achieve this level too with our tool, Animated Artwork tool from Musixmatch Pro.  As an artist, your music is your unique voice. When you take every opportunity to showcase this uniqueness in the visual components of streaming platforms, you increase the likelihood that users will discover your track.

Considering that nearly 120k songs are uploaded on Spotify every day it is crucial for you to stand out as much as possible and to use every tool at your disposal to make sure you achieve that goal. In today's music industry, finding a way to stand out is a pivotal part of the marketing plan of any successful music release.

More Streams

It's no secret that to perform better on streaming platforms, you need to meet the platform's standards and expectations to take advantage of the algorithm. All platforms are highlighting visual content, and Apple Music and Tidal are no exceptions. When you ensure that every song and album has a visual component, such as a motion album artwork cover, you position your music for increased algorithmic visibility, allowing more people to listen, access, and stay engaged, which ultimately results in more streams. 

More High-Quality Content 

Apple Music Album Motion artwork serves multiple functions. But animated artwork covers can also be used as promotional materials on social media.

Gone are the days in which independent artists with limited resources have a barrier of entry to creating stunning promotional materials that drive engagement and help build fanbases. Musixmatch Pro offers you a variety of tools to produce professional-grade assets affordably and in a matter of seconds. In the Musixmatch Pro platform you can create Apple Music Album Motion Covers with our Animated Artwork Tool, Spotify Canvas, Lyric Videos and more. You do not need deep pockets or wicked design skills. Musixmatch Pro does it for you and creates unique assets that align to your brand and music.

Artists using Album Motion Covers have seen a 30% uptick in engagement.  You can make the most of all your releases by sharing the motion artwork on social media to tease new songs, and follow up with lyric videos to keep engaging your audience. 

What are the specs for Album Motion?

Apple Music Album motion has specific specifications to prevent dramatically altering the appearance and style of the album artwork when replaced with an animated artwork cover. The animation itself should be an enhanced version of the original artwork. The files must be:

  • Without audio
  • Aspect ratio: 1:1 (3840x3840) or 3:4 (2048x2732) aspect ratios
  • Video Length: 15–35 seconds 

How to make Apple Music Album Cover

Now you know why Album Motion artwork is essential, and what the key requirements are to create an acceptable dynamic covers for Apple Music, so now we can explore the best way to make one. 

The easiest way to create an Apple Music album motion cover is to leverage Musixmatch Pro Animated Artwork tool. Our comprehensive platform enables artists to maximize their music potential with end-to-end music promotional lyric distribution and content creation tools, including multiple video assets you can share on social media.

How to make Apple Music Album Motion with Musixmatch Pro.

With the Musixmatch Pro Animated Artwork tool, you can make an Apple Music album cover in seconds with our dynamic AI animation features. We'll dynamically animate your album cover in seconds, and you can fully customize it to make it yours. In the tool, you can add motion, textures, and animations.

Animated Artwork on Musixmatch Pro 

Become a standout artist on Apple Music and Tidal with our animated artwork tool. Try it now for free. 

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