Spotify has refreshed its app icon, and the familiar green circle now looks like a glittering disco ball. The three familiar sound waves are still there, but the background has turned into a shimmering mirrored sphere. The update rolled out on May 13.
The service itself attributes the change to an anniversary: Spotify was founded in April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, and in 2026 the company turns 20. The new icon is part of the "Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s)" campaign, set to run for 20 days of user-statistics releases. Inside the app, a parallel feature has appeared, akin to the annual Wrapped but covering a user's entire listening history: first day on the service, first track played, total number of unique songs, favorite artist of all time and a playlist of the 120 most-played songs.
In Spotify's own description, the remix is "campy and fun, a simple birthday celebration," and the three preserved sound waves serve as an anchor holding the logo to its origins. The change is temporary and tied specifically to the anniversary campaign, not a rebrand.
The reception has skewed sharply negative. On X, Threads and Reddit, users describe the new icon as ugly, disorienting and hard to parse at a glance. Several wrote that they took it for a loading glitch.
The user @em_isirrelevant on X confessed: "Woke up, saw Spotify changed its icon for the 20th anniversary, and genuinely thought the app was glitching out. Sorry, but I don't like it." Susan Buchanan, also on X, wrote that she had moved Spotify to a back screen on her phone because "the new logo is so ugly it looks like a squashed weird bug even there."
On the r/graphic_design subreddit, a thread on the redesign opens with the headline "What in the name of everything holy happened to the Spotify icon?" Some subscribers are calling for a rollback in plain terms: "Dear @Spotify, bring back the old icon, this one is not my vibe at all," and "@Spotify, change the logo back. Now."
There is an opposing camp, but it is smaller. One Reddit commenter wrote: "Ugly, but I like it. Everything around us is too sterile and overengineered—weird feelings beat cold data-driven design." Another hedged more carefully: "If it's temporary, for the anniversary—acceptable. If it's permanent—absolutely not."
The episode echoes a 2015 story, when Spotify quietly tweaked the shade of its signature green and drew, in the words of its then-lead designer Tobias van Schneider, "a huge Twitter storm in which thousands of people shared their hatred for the new color." The debate over how much the audience will tolerate even cosmetic edits to the icon of one of the world's most recognizable services is repeating itself almost symmetrically.