Apple Music's rebrand drops the red: lessons from a logo made by sound
Apple Music has its first rebrand since 2015: a note shaped by sound in mineral oil and a black-and-white app. What changed and what designers can learn.
On October 21, 2026, Apple Music unveiled a new identity, its first rebrand since the service launched in 2015. The headline detail is how the new logo was made: not drawn on a screen, but physically shaped by music and filmed in camera. The quieter change is just as big for anyone who works with brand systems. Apple Music is dropping the red that has defined it for years.
This post covers what changed, how the mark was produced, and what designers and founders can take from it, whether you are building an identity for a startup or refreshing a client's brand.
What Apple announced
Apple introduced the identity as "physically shaped by an original composition" from the artist Fred again.. and NEST Acoustics. A behind-the-scenes film shows the process, which Apple says was captured entirely in camera. According to 9to5Mac, users will see the new identity in the app with iOS 27.2.
The main pieces of the new system are:
- A new note icon whose shape comes from filmed sound waves, designed to sit within Apple's Liquid Glass design language.
- A new wordmark: the Apple symbol next to the word music in bold lowercase, set in a custom version of SF Pro.
- A sonic logo built from the same composition used to shape the mark.
- A black-and-white app in place of the red accents.
How the logo was made by sound
Creative Boom's write-up explains the process. Fred again.. and NEST Acoustics wrote a composition, which was split into individual notes. Each note was played through a transducer, a device that turns audio into physical vibration, placed in a shallow tray of mineral oil. The ripples were filmed, and that footage became the basis for the new note icon.
It was not quick. The process reportedly took months of experimentation, because sound and image had to be tuned together: too many notes, or notes pitched too high, made the oil move so much that the shape became unreadable. The final mark is a record of real sound rather than an illustration of what sound might look like.
The credits show how many specialists a piece like this involves. Apple's long-time agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab led the work, Optical Arts handled production, Time Based Arts did VFX, Trafik handled colour and finishing, and Plau consulted on type and rebuilt the logo as vectors. The film was directed by Joe Jackson.
Losing the red
The colour change arrived before the announcement. Earlier in October, in coverage of iOS 27.2, 9to5Mac reported that the app icon had become white with a black note by default, and black with a white note in dark mode. Inside the app, the active tab turned blue instead of red, widgets moved to plain black backgrounds, and library rows such as Playlists, Albums and Artists became black and white.
Taking colour out of a brand this well known is a bold call. It shifts recognition from a colour to a shape, a wordmark and a sound. It also leaves more room for what is actually on screen in a music app: album art, which brings plenty of colour of its own.
There is a practical side too. A neutral shell is easier to keep consistent across light mode, dark mode and the translucent Liquid Glass surfaces Apple now uses. A strong brand colour has to be checked against every one of those backgrounds; black and white mostly takes care of itself. If you are designing a product that shows a lot of user content, it is worth asking whether your brand colour helps that content or competes with it.
Lessons for designers
Few of us have Apple's budget, but the thinking behind this rebrand carries over to much smaller projects:
- Let the process carry the story. A mark made by a real physical process gives you a launch story that a gradient tweak never will. Even on a small budget, photographing real materials or using a hand-made element can give an identity a story people remember.
- Design the system, not just the logo. Apple shipped a mark, a wordmark, a sonic logo and in-app changes together. When you pitch a rebrand, show how it works in the product, not only on a presentation slide.
- Check recognition before you remove colour. Removing a signature colour only works if the shape and name are strong enough on their own. Test your mark in one colour at small sizes before you build a system around it.
- Constraints help. The oil only produced readable shapes within a narrow range of sound. Working inside a physical constraint pushed the team toward a simpler mark.
What it means for founders
If you run a product, the most practical lesson is the rollout. Apple started with small in-app changes in a software update, revealed the full identity with a film and an artist collaboration, then rolled it out across its own content. Changes appeared in stages, not all at once.
For a startup, that could look like this: update the product UI first, then launch the new identity with one strong piece of content that explains why it changed, and only then swap out every social avatar and sales deck. It gives existing users time to adjust and gives the launch a clear story.
Conclusion
Apple Music's rebrand puts the effort into how the mark was made and into a full system around it: icon, wordmark, sound and app. Dropping the red is the riskier part, and it relies on the strength of the shape. For designers, the useful takeaways are simple: make the process part of the story, design the whole system, and test recognition before you remove the thing people know you by.
