I benchmarked 4 image models for album covers. The newest one lost on pixels, not quality.

Apple Music needs 4000px+ covers; TuneCore and CD Baby cap at 3000px. Seedream 4.5 on kie.ai stays: 4096px in one call, $0.0325, 22-33s. GPT Image 2.5 "4K" on kie.ai returned 2880px at $0.08. Seedream 5.0 Lite: 4096px, $0.0275, 2x slower. Nano Banana 2 on fal.ai won restyling.