Original research
We checked the cover art of 1,000 top podcasts
· by the Slice team. Artwork fetched 2026-10-02.
The short answer
We downloaded the full-size cover art of 1,000 top podcasts on Apple’s charts and ran each one through Slice’s own cover art checker. 8.8% fail Apple’s artwork rules, nearly all because the image the feed points to is smaller than 1400 pixels. 58% are exactly 3000 x 3000. 92% are JPEGs. Covers lean dark (22% dark against 19% light), black is the most common main colour, and most carry only a few words.
Check your coverFree. Runs in your browser.
How many top podcasts fail Apple’s artwork rules?
Apple asks for a square JPEG or PNG between 1400 and 3000 pixels a side, with no transparency, and its RSS requirements add the RGB colour space. Of 993 covers we could measure from the show’s own feed, 87 (8.8%) break a rule.
The failures are almost all one thing: the image the feed points at is too small. 86 covers are under 1400 pixels, and most of those are exactly 256 x 256 and come from one hosting platform’s image server. For the ten of these we spot-checked, Apple still serves the cover at full size from its own copy, so a listener on Apple Podcasts may never see the problem. Apps that read the feed directly get the small file. No cover was over 3000 pixels, none was a WebP or other format, and every one was RGB or greyscale.
4.9% of covers (49) are PNGs saved with a transparency channel, which Apple says covers should not have. We have not counted that as a failure, because the file is still accepted.
Slice’s checker verdicts
Our checker is a little stricter than Apple because it also flags weight: over 2 MB is worth a look and over 5 MB is a fail. 83% of top-show covers pass everything. 6.6% are 2 to 5 MB and 1.8% are over 5 MB.
What size is podcast cover art?
3000 x 3000 is the clear standard. The median cover is 3,000 pixels a side. The next most common size is the 1400 minimum.
Share of 993 covers. “Other” groups every size not listed on its own.
JPEG or PNG, and how heavy?
91.5% of covers are JPEG and 8.5% PNG. The median file is 0.5 MB. Half are under half a megabyte, which is plenty for a 3000-pixel image.
What colours do podcast covers use?
We found the five main colours of each cover and named the biggest one. Black leads on 27% of covers, then blue and grey. Bright greens, purples and pinks are rare, so a cover in one of those stands out on a chart page. The bars are drawn in the average shade of that colour across the covers it leads.
Dark or light?
By average brightness, 22% of covers are dark, 59% are in the middle and 19% are light. A dark cover can blend into a dark-mode app, so the contrast between the title and its background matters more than the overall shade.
Which genres use which colours?
Business covers are the darkest (48% dark). Kids & Family covers are the lightest (33% light). Each strip below is the main colour of every cover in that genre, sorted from dark neutrals to colours by hue. Colours only, no artwork.
News · 81 covers · 11% dark, 21% light · mostly blue, grey, black
Comedy · 66 covers · 9% dark, 14% light · mostly black, grey, orange
Society & Culture · 66 covers · 11% dark, 30% light · mostly black, white, orange
Business · 58 covers · 48% dark, 12% light · mostly black, blue, grey
Sports · 55 covers · 24% dark, 16% light · mostly black, blue, grey
True Crime · 55 covers · 44% dark, 11% light · mostly black, grey, white
Education · 54 covers · 13% dark, 30% light · mostly black, grey, orange
Health & Fitness · 53 covers · 21% dark, 23% light · mostly black, blue, grey
Religion & Spirituality · 50 covers · 24% dark, 16% light · mostly black, grey, white
Arts · 48 covers · 25% dark, 15% light · mostly black, grey, blue
Fiction · 48 covers · 44% dark, 15% light · mostly black, blue, teal
History · 48 covers · 21% dark, 15% light · mostly black, blue, grey
TV & Film · 47 covers · 13% dark, 21% light · mostly grey, black, blue
Kids & Family · 46 covers · 7% dark, 33% light · mostly blue, teal, white
Music · 46 covers · 22% dark, 15% light · mostly black, yellow, grey
Leisure · 45 covers · 29% dark, 18% light · mostly black, grey, blue
Science · 45 covers · 13% dark, 22% light · mostly black, yellow, blue
Technology · 45 covers · 27% dark, 16% light · mostly black, blue, red
Government · 44 covers · 25% dark, 14% light · mostly blue, black, grey
| Genre | Covers | Dark | Light | Median brightness | Median contrast | Top colour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| News | 81 | 11% | 21% | 0.29 | 0.23 | blue (24%) |
| Comedy | 66 | 9% | 14% | 0.28 | 0.25 | black (23%) |
| Society & Culture | 66 | 11% | 30% | 0.34 | 0.24 | black (21%) |
| Business | 58 | 48% | 12% | 0.13 | 0.20 | black (53%) |
| Sports | 55 | 24% | 16% | 0.17 | 0.23 | black (27%) |
| True Crime | 55 | 44% | 11% | 0.13 | 0.20 | black (53%) |
| Education | 54 | 13% | 30% | 0.27 | 0.23 | black (20%) |
| Health & Fitness | 53 | 21% | 23% | 0.26 | 0.20 | black (23%) |
| Religion & Spirituality | 50 | 24% | 16% | 0.26 | 0.21 | black (24%) |
| Arts | 48 | 25% | 15% | 0.21 | 0.22 | black (35%) |
| Fiction | 48 | 44% | 15% | 0.14 | 0.19 | black (40%) |
| History | 48 | 21% | 15% | 0.26 | 0.21 | black (23%) |
| TV & Film | 47 | 13% | 21% | 0.28 | 0.23 | grey (19%) |
| Kids & Family | 46 | 7% | 33% | 0.37 | 0.24 | blue (28%) |
| Music | 46 | 22% | 15% | 0.24 | 0.25 | black (30%) |
| Leisure | 45 | 29% | 18% | 0.22 | 0.22 | black (40%) |
| Science | 45 | 13% | 22% | 0.24 | 0.22 | black (24%) |
| Technology | 45 | 27% | 16% | 0.18 | 0.21 | black (31%) |
| Government | 44 | 25% | 14% | 0.24 | 0.22 | blue (23%) |
How much text is on a podcast cover?
We ran OCR (Tesseract, English) over every cover. It read at least one word on 83% of them. The median cover with text has 3 words, covering about 7.3% of the image: usually the show’s name and little else.
Then we shrank each cover to 200 pixels, about the size of a cover on a phone’s browse page, and read it again. On average only 49% of the words survived, and on 27% of covers every word did. Small text is the usual casualty, which is why Apple asks you to keep the title prominent and the rest short.
OCR misses hand-drawn, outlined and heavily stylised lettering, and the English model reads non-Latin scripts poorly, so these are lower bounds. The 200-pixel test is a rough stand-in for legibility, not a measure of what a person can read. Slice’s checker does not score legibility; it shows your cover at real small sizes so you can judge.
Does your cover pass?
The podcast cover art checker runs the checks used here on your file, in your browser, and shows it at the sizes listeners see. To see your cover next to the shows you compete with, open the cover gallery by genre and country.
How we did it
- The shows. Apple’s public top-shows charts for the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, and Apple’s US charts for 19 genres: 25 charts in all, read on 2026-10-02. We took shows rank by rank across every chart at once until we had 1,000 different shows, so each chart contributes roughly its top 40. India’s chart came back empty from Apple’s newer chart feed, so we used Apple’s older iTunes chart feed for it.
- The artwork. For each show, the iTunes Lookup API gave us the RSS feed, and the feed’s
itunes:imagegave us the full-size file the show publishes. Each image was downloaded once, four at a time with a pause between requests and a User-Agent naming us. 7 feeds would not give us an image, so for those we used Apple’s copy for colour and text and left them out of the size, format and weight figures (993 covers). - The checks. The same function that powers our cover art checker: square, 1400 to 3000 pixels, JPEG or PNG, and weight (2 MB and 5 MB lines). We added Apple’s colour-space rule, which a browser cannot read, and noted transparency.
- The colours. Each cover shrunk to 64 x 64 and clustered into five colours (k-means). The biggest cluster is the “main colour”, named by hue, saturation and lightness. Dark means mean luminance under 0.12, light means over 0.45.
- The text. Tesseract OCR on a 1000-pixel copy, counting words read with confidence of 70 or more, then again on a 200-pixel copy scaled back up.
- What we publish. Totals and colours only. The page shows no artwork and names no show, and the raw images were never stored anywhere public.
Limits: one day’s charts; top shows only, which are better resourced than most; the genre is the first top-level genre Apple lists for the show. Feeds change, so a cover measured here may already be different.
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Questions
What size should podcast cover art be?
Apple asks for a square image between 1400 x 1400 and 3000 x 3000 pixels, as a JPEG or PNG, with no transparency. Make it 3000 x 3000: 58% of the 993 top-show covers we measured are exactly that size, and another 22% sit at the 1400 minimum.
How many top podcasts fail Apple’s artwork rules?
87 of 993 (8.8%). Almost all are too small: 86 feeds point at artwork under 1400 pixels, and 2 are not square. None was over 3000 pixels and none used a colour space other than RGB or greyscale.
Should podcast cover art be JPEG or PNG?
Either is accepted. 92% of top shows use JPEG, which is usually much lighter for a photo or a gradient. The median cover weighs 0.5 MB; 8.5% are over 2 MB, heavier than they need to be.
Are podcast covers mostly dark or light?
More dark than light: 22% of covers are dark overall and 19% are light, with the rest in between. Black is the most common main colour, on 27% of covers. Business is the darkest genre (48% dark) and Kids & Family the lightest (33% light).
How much text do top podcast covers have?
Not much. OCR read at least one word on 83% of covers, and the median cover with text had 3 words, usually the show's name. OCR misses stylised lettering, so treat these as lower bounds.
How can I check my own podcast cover?
Use the free Slice podcast cover art checker. It runs the same checks used in this study, in your browser, and shows your cover at the small sizes listeners actually see.
Download the data
The aggregates on this page as a CSV: podcast-cover-art-2026.csv. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Slice (tryslicemedia.com)” and link to this page.
More research
- How many creatives work for themselves?: US Census, BLS and UK figures on self-employed artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers.
- Creator economy statistics 2026: The most-cited figures, each with its source, its date and the range where sources disagree.
- The Podcast Census 2026: Every podcast in the open Podcast Index, counted: how many are alive, where they quit, video, automation and names.