Baby oil and sound waves: How Apple Music created its new brand mark

Apple has just given fans another peek behind the curtain.

To introduce the new Apple Music logo, Apple and ad agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab created a 78-second behind-the-scenes spot showcasing how the new logo was made using soundwaves.

Showing the work behind the work is an approach the company and agency took last fall when it showed off the process behind creating the updated Apple TV logo.

Apple isn’t alone in doing so. Over the last year, as the use of AI has many people questioning how things are made, it’s become common for brands to showcase the craft and production expertise of the human beings working on those efforts. Just this week, for example, Prada specified that the company’s whimsical, partially animated holiday campaign was “animated by hand” in the title.

We spoke with James Taylor, global head of design at Apple’s agency, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, about the process of making Apple Music’s new logo, why he views it as important to show audiences craft, and the increasingly common behind-the-scenes videos accompanying marketing and branding efforts.

“We’re in a space right now where audiences are looking to understand how things are done, especially from Apple,” Taylor told Marketing Brew. “What Apple does from a product and marketing standpoint always sits on the edge of wonder…There’s a curiosity, which I think is becoming even more acute at the moment because things are feeling automated and generated, and I think people are looking to feel things a little bit more. This asset, this behind-the-scenes film, does many of those jobs for us.”

Research and development

The idea behind the project was simple: Create a visual mark for the brand from sound. But crafting a mnemonic for the brand that could sound appealing as well as provide an enticing visual identity proved to be a challenge. It took 12 weeks of research and development to see if it was even feasible to do so, Taylor said.

To make the visual logo, the team, along with production company Optical Artists, created a rig submerged in liquid that would move based on sound waves, which would then move the liquid and create distinct visuals.

As for the mnemonic, Apple Music tapped Nest Acoustics and producer Fred again…, Taylor told us.

For the sound, “if you do anything complicated, it’s going to make the liquid just move violently,” Taylor said. “There was a really interesting tension about, could a beautiful piece of music make something beautiful visually?”

The 12-week research and development effort was dedicated to answering that question. There were tests of “what cadence of notes would give us the right kind of ripples,” Taylor said.

As for the visuals themselves, the team became “very experienced with baby oil and the different dilutions of baby oil,” he said, which helped create a glass-refraction effect.

All liquid

Using liquid to capture the sound-wave visual for Apple Music is also a reference to the company’s overall design language, Liquid Glass, which was first introduced in June 2025.

Taylor and his team worked on the original Apple TV logo refresh, and when creating the Apple TV logo last year, he told us the team looked at the rebrand through “the lens of the category,” so it was inspired by the hallmarks of cinema, “lensing, light, and color,” with the logo made of glass.

With the new brand mark, “we were like, ‘What could be an interesting callback to the Liquid Glass aesthetic, which felt relevant for music?’” he said. “We really saw this interesting idea of, ‘What would glass feel like if it was refracted by sound?’ So that was the starting point.”

The resulting glass-like logo is a flexible and transparent visual mark that can feature musical artists behind it as well as take up sizable real estate in marketing. “As you’ll see over the next coming months, the identity is built in a way which can flex across different artists, different stories, and is repeatable,” Taylor said. “It’s going to be very hardworking as this kind of piece of art.”

While that logo—er, art—had a lengthy research and development process, the production to create the spot behind it was pretty “pragmatic,” Taylor said.

“There was a heavy amount of actual production content,” he said, “but in terms of the BTS, there’s only so many times you can shoot a ripple.”