It goes without saying that the quality of music attracts the fans the most. But what initially grabs the attention is the design of an album cover. Whether it’s flipping through vinyl at a record store or scrolling through music releases on Spotify, eye-catching art is what makes an EP, single or album gain a new listener.

Artwork is a vital part of a release plan that gives the opportunity to present the whole brand as a single image. For the longest time, the only art creation options that musicians had were commissioning design and DIY. Now the third possibility has emerged – less resource-intensive and time-consuming – generating art with the help of AI technologies.  

Artificial intelligence is not only supplementing business and healthcare but also makes an impact on the music industry. There are numerous AI-powered music tools for all kinds of tasks, from A&R and marketing to music production and art creation.

Let’s take a look at the 5 best AI art generators you can use to explore new creative territories, prepare album cover art for your next release, and maybe even turn your creation into NFTs.

Dream by Wombo

Unlike many other AI art tools on the market that require payment or have other restrictions, Dream by Wombo is absolutely free which is great for everyone, but especially so for independent artists with a limited budget. The software is available online and can also be downloaded as a mobile app on iOS and Android. Note that the mobile version offers more features.

With its help, you can create an unlimited number of artworks that look so beautiful that they can be put on an album cover as well as on your wall. The service is easy to use – all you need to create art is to simply have an idea of what you want, type it as text and pick one of the many styles. Baroque, Dali, Dark Fantasy, Ghibli, Psychic, Robots and Synthwave can be selected among others. You can also refine what you want by adding a reference image you want to base your album art on.

Starry AI

It’s a powerful AI art generator that comes as iOS and Android applications and also as a web service. Enter a prompt for the algorithm to work with – it can be submitted in any way, shape or form, including text and even emojis. Select a preferred style, mode, aspect ratio and/or reference image, and you are good to go. Granular control over certain aspects of artwork makes the results a lot closer to what you’ve got in mind.

Starry AI is available for free but it has a limitation of 5 artworks per day without watermarks. Everything the AI-generated by your request is fully yours, so you don’t have to worry about copyright infringement and other legal issues. You can freely use artworks immediately after they were created, whether it’s for your music release, social media or an NFT project.

NightCafe

Available online, NightCafe is one of the simplest text-to-image converters. Just type some keywords or a sentence, choose one of the art styles and get an image in just a couple of minutes or even faster. In addition to various styles (Cubist, Surreal, Steampunk, Oil Painting, to name a few), you can also add other modifiers such as specific cultural genres, techniques and artists.

There are two main styles – Artistic and Coherent. The latter is better for realistic images while the Artistic version is for abstract creations. You can make a lot of tweaks including the adjustment of aspect ratio, output resolution and a few other settings. However, all tweaks come at a cost: as a user, you get 5 daily credits (and 5 additional ones upon registration) and each tweak requires spending credits. Prepare to get only one AI-generated image that fits your needs a day.

ArtBreeder

It’s a machine learning-based art website where you can create images yourself and through collaboration with other users. ArtBreeder allows you to both generate new images and modify existing ones by ‘breeding’ them with other pictures from the publicly available database. Dictate the final product by selecting colors, shapes and other characteristics.

The service doesn’t just create abstract art, it also makes faces, landscapes, and paintings, among other kinds of images. New variations can be made by tweaking sliders on the image page, known as ‘genes’. You can change every aspect of any image just by adjusting the genes.

For example, in the Portrait mode, facial features, expressions, accessories, gender, color balance and other things can be changed at a drop of a hat. Note that ArtBreeder is a freemium service – with the free version you’re limited to 3 image uploads, and you can only upload 5 images per month.

Pixray

Though may seem like just another AI text to image generator, it actually comes with a twist – custom codes. Pixray is a free tool that you can run in a browser, on a computer or via API. With its customizable AI engines and extensive documentation, Pixray is perfect for geeks.

Firstly you add a text prompt like you normally would, then select one AI render engines in the ‘drawer’ – ‘pixel’ creates pixel art, ‘vqgan’ generates GAN-images (they often come out either kind of trippy or realistic), whereas ‘clipdraw/line_sketch’ makes stoke-based drawing-like images. With just these 2 steps alone you can already get great pictures but the real fun begins when you adjust the settings.

In the documentation, there are many things you can tweak and add, such as artists, styles, quality, iterations, scale, filters, etc. It’s not easy reading but no actual coding is involved, so basically anyone can handle Pixray.

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