Apple Music rebrand swaps its red icon for black and white

Apple Music has given itself its first full visual overhaul since 2015, trading the familiar red icon for a black-and-white identity with a new logo, a new wordmark, and a new sound signature. The service announced the change on October 21, and the strangest detail of the Apple Music rebrand is how the visuals were made. Apple says they were physically shaped by sound itself, rather than drawn on a computer.

Instead of rendering the new identity digitally, the team built a rig around a shallow tank of mineral oil. The Apple Music logo was etched into the glass floor of the tank, a clear cover cut in the shape of the app icon was laid on top, and a transducer turned an original piece of music into physical vibration. That sent the oil rippling outward and distorted the logo in real time while cameras rolled, the defining image of the Apple Music rebrand. The Technology Express reports that the designers then used that footage as the raw material for the animated branding.

Made by sound

The music came from British producer Fred again.., who wrote the composition with the sound design studio NEST Acoustics, according to The Technology Express. The team played individual notes through the transducer one at a time, filming the shifting patterns and light refractions each frequency produced in the oil. Apple says the group spent months experimenting with frequencies, materials, and camera techniques before the effect looked right, and 9to5Mac reports that the final result was captured entirely in camera, with no computer graphics standing in.

Apple explained the thinking in a behind-the-scenes film, where the narration says the goal was to take the idea of music and distill it into something visually beautiful, in effect to create the perfect sound wave. That framing is why the Apple Music rebrand keeps getting described as made by sound. It is a literal claim about the production method, not a slogan, and the footage is now doing real work across the platform.

The same footage will run as a short sting at the start of Apple Music videos, AppleInsider reports, with a two-note version of the logo overlaid onto concert footage and other platform content. The wordmark got reworked as well, becoming a heavier, rounder lowercase treatment of Apple's own SF Pro typeface set beside the Apple symbol, a clear break from the look the service has carried since launch, and the typographic half of the Apple Music rebrand. The Technology Express notes that the monochrome direction ties the service to Apple's Liquid Glass design language, the translucent, material-focused look running through the company's current software.

Where the new look lands

Listeners will see the change arrive with the next round of software updates, which are expected to bring the black-and-white icon to devices on the next iOS and macOS releases, version 27.2. Developer Andreas Storm had already spotted the updated icon in an October beta of the new software, so the official announcement confirmed what beta watchers had been passing around for weeks, softening the shock of the Apple Music rebrand rather than landing as a genuine surprise.

The new identity also made its public debut at the opening of the Apple Music Hall in Battersea, London, where a chunkier version of the logo appeared in person before the behind-the-scenes film explained how it was built, according to AppleInsider. That staging matters, because it presented the Apple Music rebrand as a cultural event first and a software update second, with the venue itself carrying the new mark before most listeners ever saw it on their phones.

Not everyone is sold. The new app icon has already drawn complaints online from listeners who liked the red, and the loudest early reactions have been about that single change rather than the logo or the wordmark. Some of the criticism is simple attachment to a color that marked the service for more than a decade, which is exactly the kind of reaction a rebrand invites when it retires something that familiar.

The composition behind the logo doubles as the service's new audio signature. Until now, Apple TV was the only Apple service with its own sonic mnemonic, composed by Finneas, so Apple Music becomes the second in the lineup to get one. For a streaming service, that makes a certain sense: the sound people hear when the brand appears is now built from the same notes that shaped the logo, and the whole identity, sound and image alike, comes from one piece of music. The Technology Express and Gadget Review both covered the announcement in detail.