Spotify is celebrating its 20-year anniversary, and as part of that celebration they decided to change their logo. Without warning, the icon on our phones became a green disco ball with the sound waves on top. When I first saw this, I’ll admit I was confused. But as soon as I opened the app and saw the “Party of the Years” pop up with a similar disco ball aesthetic I thought, well that’s fun.

But a lot of people on the internet seem to have some very strong opinions about this change. Some started panicking about whether this is temporary or permanent. Others called it a blunder of a rebrand and a betrayal to their well-known branding. And then some applauded it as a great way to get people’s attention and talking about Spotify.

My best guess is that the Spotify team thought it would be a fun and creative way to celebrate their 20th anniversary while inviting users to join them in the nostalgia. And I’m sure part of it was also to get people’s attention and have them open the app. I don’t think, however, they were trying to permanently change their logo (they did end up confirming it is temporary) or piss off all their users.

But once you’re a big enough entity (company, celebrity, etc) people seem to think they can criticize what you did or didn’t do without having much context around the decision-making or circumstances that led to the decision. And I think when it came to this change, a lot of people overreacted. Whether they were doing it just to get engagement themselves or were genuinely offended by this logo change can’t be known, but I was surprised at how many people had strong negative feelings about this.

Personally, I felt pretty neutral about this whole thing. I enjoyed learning what my first ever played song was and seeing my top all-time played songs. But the content did not compare to “Wrapped” and didn’t have as much meat behind it. And now I have yet another Spotify-created playlist that mostly serves to pull me deeper into my own listening rabbit hole rather than helping me discover new artists and genres.

The irony is not lost on me that I’m writing about how too many people wrote about this topic, but I wanted to provide a more neutral perspective on the whole thing. Not everything that a company does has to be perfect or a bid deal. I think we shouldn’t be so quick to judge or criticize when a company decides to do something fun and creative. We could use more whimsy and human creativity in this world these days.