Apple Shook a Tank of Oil to Give Its Music App a Black-and-White Logo
Apple Music ditched 13 years of red for a monochrome identity it says was "made by sound," built with Fred again.. and NEST Acoustics and captured entirely in-camera. No CGI, just liquid, light, and a very expensive way to get to grayscale.
Apple officially unveiled Apple Music's new brand identity on October 21, swapping the decade-old red note for a stripped-down black-and-white mark the company is calling "Made by Sound." The accompanying video, posted to Apple Music's own channel, insists the whole thing happened practically: no CGI, no digital trickery, just sound distorting an object in real time and a camera catching it.
Here is the actual process, because it is a lot. Electronic producer Fred again.. wrote a short piece of music specifically for the project, and NEST Acoustics built a rig around it: the Apple Music logo was etched into the glass floor of a small tank filled with mineral oil, with a transparent, app-icon-shaped cover sitting over it. When the composed tones played, a transducer sent ripples through the oil that physically warped the logo underneath, and that distortion is what got filmed. Apple is positioning the result as "the perfect sound wave" made visible, a brand mnemonic literally shaped by a song rather than drawn by a designer.
The identity leans hard on Apple's Liquid Glass design language from iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe, and it is not the company's first rodeo with this trick: Apple TV got the same in-camera, sound-driven treatment for its own rebrand back in November 2025. Early pieces of the Apple Music change had already leaked through iOS 27.2 betas in October, drawing the kind of reaction that tends to greet any logo swap, equal parts "boring" and "bring back the red," before Apple had even explained itself. Now that the full story is out, the question is whether an elaborate physical-effects shoot makes a grayscale icon land any better, or whether Apple just spent a lot of money justifying the removal of its own color.
The refreshed identity, including the icon, in-app visuals, and the rippling "made by sound" sting that now opens Apple Music videos, rolls out fully with iOS 27.2 and macOS 27.2 next week. Pricing is unchanged: Apple Music still runs $11.99 a month on its own, or as part of an Apple One bundle.
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Source: Apple Music
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
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