The technology industry has spent the better part of a decade refining the corporate logo into something approaching a universal form: clean, flat, inoffensive and, in the view of at least one critic, anatomically suggestive in ways that were probably not intended.

So when Spotify replaced its familiar green icon with a disco ball this week — a temporary change to mark the streaming service's 20th anniversary — the reaction in certain corners of the marketing world was swift and, by the standards of LinkedIn discourse, rather heated.

Andrew Tindall, a strategist who writes about advertising effectiveness, offered a defense of the redesign that was notably more colorful than the icon itself. The four-pointed sparkle that has become standard visual shorthand for artificial intelligence brands, Mr. Tindall wrote in The Drum, resembles nothing so much as "a corporate butthole."

(One assumes the brand governance committees at Google, Microsoft and Anthropic will take this under advisement.)

His larger point, beneath the scatological imagery, concerns what he sees as a growing timidity in technology branding. "Tech brands have become so obsessed with being recognizable that they forgot to be memorable," Mr. Tindall wrote. The disco ball, imperfect though it may be at tiny sizes, at least represents an attempt at showmanship — a quality that has become scarce among companies whose visual identities increasingly resemble one another.

The criticism of Spotify's redesign — that it is difficult to find, that it lacks "readability" — struck Mr. Tindall as overblown. "The app icon is always where you left it," he observed, with what one might call restrained patience.

Whether a temporary anniversary graphic constitutes genuine brand building or merely a brief disruption to muscle memory is, of course, a matter of some debate. But in an industry where distinctiveness has been so thoroughly systematized that it has begun to produce sameness, a disco ball is at least harder to confuse with the competition.

Original story published in The Drum: "Andrew Tindall: Spotify’s new disco icon beats another corporate tech butthole | The Drum"