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Apple's 'Surprise and Shine' Playlist: The Soundtrack to a $2,000 Decision

By Ricky G. | Austin, Texas

Apple hosted its "Surprise and Shine" event on Sept. 9 to announce its new lineup, including the iPhone Duo, which is Apple's first foldable phone. I was mostly paying attention to CEO John Ternus hyping up the new devices, but what actually caught my attention was the music.

Every Apple event and commercial seems to have the coolest curated soundtrack, pulling from newer artists and familiar names alike. A handful of tracks from this event stuck out to me:

Each song somehow turned a hardware announcement into a mood and that's not an accident. While they were all different genres and different tempos, each one had an interesting BPM shift (a texture you don't always hear in advertising).

I guess you'd call these needle drops. In Hollywood, that's when an already-released song, instead of an original score, is used to do the emotional heavy lifting. Apple's been using this method for years, pairing new products with cool tracks until the song and the device basically become inseparable in your memory. I think back to the iPod Nano commercial from 2007 with Feist's song called 1234.

These song/product pairings are special. By the time the big reveal happens, I haven't lost focus. I'm locked into the specs of the new product and now riding the waveβ€”thanks to the playlist someone else built for me. One hyped-up track at a time, and the number at the end feels smaller than it is.

That's the part I keep coming back to. $2,000 for the new iPhone Duo. The way I see it, that's going to keep me glued to my phone a little longer. That's a few months of car payments, a semester of daycare, a flight home to see family twice over. And yet a good soundtrack can make that number feel like a rounding error. (Girl math!) No shade to Apple, it's just what music does. It sparks a feeling. It's powerful like that.

So here's the question I asked myself while writing this: when you take away the playlist, do I see the product the same way?

I don't think that I do. It's hard to say now because I've seen the product. But next event I'm going to mute the audio and see what happens.

Side note but related… remember how there was always music blasting in Hollister? Did it make you want to buy an overpriced polo with a bird on it? Yeah, it made me want to buy it. But my parents weren't fooled.

My main takeaway from this is that it's cool when Apple can give artists a boost and put their music in front of millions of people around the world. But I also think music used in advertising has a real effect on you. It's worth knowing when it's working on you before you decide something's worth $2,000.