Spotify swaps logo for a Disco Ball in anniversary push, and users are split
Spotify has turned its familiar green app icon into a sparkly disco ball as part of its 20th anniversary campaign.
On its Spotify 20 hub, the company says, "2026 marks 20 years of Spotify," and it is using the milestone to roll out "Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s)," a mobile-only in-app experience that surfaces a listener’s first day on Spotify, first streamed song, total unique songs listened to, all-time most-streamed artist, and an all-time top songs playlist.
The experience is available across 144 markets in 16 languages.
The basics of the rollout:
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| App icon | Spotify replaced the classic 2-D green circle and soundwave mark with a 3-D sparkly green disco-ball version while keeping the wave lines. |
| Campaign | The icon change sits inside "Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s)." |
| Scope | The in-app experience is mobile-only and is live in 144 markets and 16 languages. |
| Brand logic | Spotify’s design team says the company adapts its logo bug at key moments and lets it become "an expression of culture." |
The response was immediate: we read X posts about Spotify's new app icon, and they just don't like it.
Some even reported that they are not able to distinguish between Spotify and other apps with similar logos, like Uber Eats and more:
Users on The Independent complained that the new icon looked "hideous" and "pixelated," while others said it resembled an app that was still updating or downloading rather than a finished design.
On Spotify’s own community forum, users opened a live idea thread asking for the icon to be changed back, saying the new version was hard to find, looked bad, and should be reverted or made optional.
Spotify’s own design team has framed the company’s visual changes as deliberate and situational rather than permanent reinventions.
In an official interview on its newsroom site, Lauren Solomon, Spotify’s senior director of global brand, said the company adapts its logo bug at key moments and lets it become "an expression of culture," pointing to Wrapped-era logo variations as an example.
In the same interview, Spotify said the green that defines its brand was chosen intentionally to stand apart from the blues and neutrals common in tech branding.
The open question is how long the disco ball survives.
Spotify has not posted a removal date, and the current change reads more like a campaign skin than a permanent rebrand.
For now, the company has turned one of the music industry’s most recognizable icons into an anniversary stunt that is drawing as much attention for its look as for the listening-history data it is meant to celebrate.
