Apple Music has been given a redesign, and it turns out that Fred Again was involved in the making of its new visual.
“For the rebrand of Apple Music, we wanted sound to create the visuals,” we learn in an explainer video. “How do we take this idea of music and distill it into something visually beautiful?”
Working with Nest Acoustics, the creative team decided that the answer to this question was to create “the perfect sound wave” and use it to generate a new and fluid visual identity.
“We take a frequency and we play it through a rig,” we’re told. “This rig then moves a large amount of liquid at the frequency of the notes.”
It was Fred Again – “one of the world's best music artists” – who came up with the musical motif that was used for the final mnemonic, though we don’t actually see or hear from him in the video.
In collaborating with a big tech company, he follows in the footsteps of his mentor Brian Eno, who created the famous startup sound for Windows 95. There was a certain irony, though, in the fact that Eno actually created this on a Mac: “I’ve never used a PC in my life,” he would later admit.
In the era of AI, Apple’s decision to generate its new visual by capturing something real on camera is certainly refreshing. What’s more, we suspect that it will be better received than its infamous 2024 ‘Crush!’ ad for the new Apple iPad Pro, which depicted a collection of objects associated with creativity - including a number of musical instruments and a mixing desk - being crushed by a gigantic slab of metal.
The company later apologised for the clip and withdrew it, saying: "We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry."
