· Firestick.io Team · Guides · 8 min read
How to Turn Off Videos on Spotify on Firestick (2026 Guide)
Spotify's Canvas videos looping behind your music? One setting turns them off permanently on Firestick. Updated after Spotify's April 2026 controls rollout.
You’re watching music on Spotify through your Firestick and behind every track there’s a looping video clip — slow-motion rain, abstract visuals, someone walking through fog. It looks fine on a phone. On a 65-inch TV across the room, it’s distracting at best and a quiet bandwidth drain at worst.
That feature is called Canvas, and Spotify quietly shipped a proper universal toggle for it in April 2026. The setting now syncs across every platform — mobile, desktop, web, and TV — so you flip it once and you’re done everywhere, including your Fire TV app.
Here’s exactly how to turn it off.
To turn off videos on Spotify on your Firestick, open the Spotify app and go to Settings and Privacy → Content and Display → Canvas, then toggle it OFF. This disables the looping video feature across all your devices at once — the change syncs automatically to your Fire TV app.
What Is Canvas (and Why You’d Want It Off)?
Canvas is Spotify’s name for the short looping videos — usually 3 to 8 seconds — that play in the background while a track is running. Artists upload them as a visual layer on top of album art. On mobile, they can look nice. On a Firestick, they’re pulling video data on a connection that could be doing literally anything better.
A few reasons people disable Canvas on Fire TV:
- Bandwidth: Your Firestick is sharing WiFi with every other device in the house. Background video streams add up.
- Performance: Older Firestick models (Lite, 2nd-gen) can slow down when handling video playback in a music app they were never really designed to optimize.
- Preference: You put music on to listen to it. You don’t need anything moving.
Before Spotify’s April 2026 update, this was buried or inconsistently available across platforms. Now it’s a clean toggle in one place.
How to Turn Off Videos on Spotify — Step by Step
This works on the Spotify Fire TV app. The menu labels match what you’ll see on your screen through your remote.
How to Turn Off Canvas Videos on Spotify
5 stepsOpen Spotify on Your Firestick
Launch the Spotify app from your Fire TV home screen or your app library. If you don’t have it installed, search for it in the Amazon App Store — it’s a free download.
Navigate to Settings
From the Spotify home screen, use your remote’s D-pad to navigate to the gear icon or your profile area. Select Settings and Privacy. On the Fire TV app, this is usually found by pressing the hamburger menu or navigating to your profile in the top-left corner.
Open Content and Display
Inside Settings, scroll down to find “Content and Display” and select it. This is the section that controls visual elements — Canvas lives here alongside a few other display options.
Find the Canvas Toggle
You’ll see a Canvas option with a brief description. It controls whether looping visuals play behind tracks in the app. By default, it’s turned on.
Toggle Canvas OFF
Select Canvas and toggle it to OFF. The change saves automatically and syncs to your other devices. No restart required — the next track you play will show static album art instead of video.
Still Seeing Videos? Try This
If you toggled Canvas off but tracks are still showing video-style backgrounds, a couple of things could be happening:
The setting didn’t save. Navigate back to Settings and Privacy → Content and Display and confirm Canvas is still set to OFF. Occasionally on the Fire TV app, settings take a second to register through the D-pad interface.
The app needs a cache clear. Fire TV apps can cache visual preferences. Go to Settings → Applications → Manage Installed Applications → Spotify → Clear Cache, then reopen the app and check the setting again. This usually resolves any persistent visual quirks.
You’re looking at something other than Canvas. Spotify also has animated album art in some contexts that isn’t technically Canvas — it’s built into certain artist pages and playlists. Canvas specifically refers to the looping clips that play during active track playback. If you’re seeing animations in the app interface itself (not during playback), that’s separate.
Why Your Firestick Streams Better Without Background Video
If you use Spotify on a shared WiFi network — which is most people — Canvas adds a small but consistent video stream running in the background of what should be an audio app. On a Firestick Lite or older model with limited RAM, that visual rendering overhead is real.
The more relevant issue for Firestick users: your ISP can throttle video traffic separately from audio traffic. Canvas technically counts as video. A VPN encrypts all your traffic at the packet level, so your ISP sees data — not “this device is streaming video” — and can’t selectively slow it down.
Get Surfshark VPN — 86% Off
→What You’re Left With: Spotify Without Canvas
After disabling Canvas, Spotify on your Firestick behaves like a straightforward audio app — which is what it is. Album art displays as a static image during playback. The app runs lighter. Tracks load just as fast, the controls work the same way, and nothing you care about in Spotify changes.
Spotify Canvas Toggle
- Single toggle disables Canvas across all platforms
- Available on free and paid Spotify tiers
- Settings sync automatically once changed
- Reduces visual noise and minor bandwidth overhead on Fire TV
✓ Pros
- One setting disables Canvas everywhere — mobile, desktop, and Fire TV sync automatically
- Available to all users regardless of subscription tier
- Genuinely improves performance on older or lower-end Firestick models
- No restart or reinstall needed — takes effect on the next track
✕ Cons
- The setting path (Content and Display) isn't obvious on first look — you'd never find it without knowing to look there
- Some animated backgrounds in Spotify's interface aren't controlled by the Canvas toggle
Related Firestick Streaming Guides
If you’re optimizing how your Firestick handles streaming apps in general, these are worth a read:
- Clearing cache fixes more than you’d think — How to Clear Cache on Firestick covers the full process for every app, not just Spotify.
- Slow Firestick in general? The How to Speed Up Your Firestick guide has 15 specific things you can do, starting with the free ones.
- Best overall settings for streaming — Best Firestick Settings for Streaming Quality is the place to start if you’re doing a full tune-up.
If you’re using Spotify mostly for background music while you’re doing other things on the TV, it might be worth exploring what else your Firestick can do for live content — Unify IPTV is worth a look for anyone who wants live TV channels without a cable bill.
Explore Unify IPTV — Live TV on Firestick
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Last updated: May 2026
