Coldplay announced a new album, Music Of The Spheres, today. Perhaps the most notable takeaway from the news is that some of the songs are titled only with emojis, which looks like it will cause problems with streaming services.
As shown on Coldplay’s website, Track 1 is titled with a Ringed Planet emoji, Track 4 is titled with a Sparkles emoji, Track 6 is titled with a Red Heart emoji, Track 9 is titled with a Globe Showing Americas emoji, and Track 11 is titled with an Infinity emoji. However, that may not be how the songs appear on streaming services, as the current Apple Music page for the album shows titles written with Unicode characters instead of emojis.
(To explain it simply, an emoji is a graphic that can take the place of a corresponding Unicode character. For example, the Grinning Face emoji corresponds to Unicode character U+1F600. In other words, the Grinning Face emoji is a representation of Unicode character U+1F600.)
The Apple Music titles for the aforementioned songs (on both the Apple Music website and in the Apple Music app for Mac), respectively, are “⦵,” “*✧,” “♡,” “❍,” and “∞.” Interestingly, while those are fairly accurate visual representations of the emojis, none of them actually correspond to the Unicode characters represented by the emojis used in the actual song titles (as seen on Coldplay’s website). So, technically speaking, Apple Music’s titles look similar to the real titles but are actually wrong.
Back in May, Chris Martin revealed that the band was having issues with streaming services and emoji song titles, saying, “We’re trying to figure this out right now: We’re trying to have the first album ever with some tracks that are just called emojis, but it’s proving tricky because of all the service providers. Some of them say, ‘We can’t do that.’ You literally have ten million songs in one box. Let us have a picture of an apple for a song or something like that.”
Music Of The Spheres is out 10/15 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.
Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.