Update: The album is now live on Apple Music after what has been described as a “misunderstanding” between Apple and digital aggregator Ditto Music.
A Vision Pro parody ad on an album featuring actor Stephen Fry has been banned from an album on Apple Music. The spoof ad for an iHead product was actually created some four years before Apple actually launched a headset (sorry, spatial computer), and you can watch it below …
British singer-songwriter Tim Arnold told me that his new album Super Connected launched on Spotify as planned, but has been banned from Apple Music because it contains a joke “ad” for an Apple headset called iHead.
The track is a short sketch, featuring beloved British actor Stephen Fry humorously describing the benefits of the “iHead,” a fictional immersive headset at the centre of the concept album’s narrative story. Although created in 2019, the “iHead” has similarities to Apple’s new Vision Pro.
The track “A Commercial Break” is clearly tongue-in-cheek, serving as a parody commercial for a fake product. Although it seems to have touched a digital nerve with Apple.
Arnold has been told that Apple claims to have an issue with the concept of a fake ad, rather than with the fact that the Vision Pro is the target of the satire. However, he notes that Apple has allowed other albums with joke ads.
Other albums on Apple Music such as Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs For The Deaf, TD Cruze’s TDTV and The Who’s The Who Sell Out, all contain parody ads or fake radio segments.
Top comment by Val Charlton
Thanks for publishing this. I designed the 'iHead' and we never expected it to create all this fuss with Apple. It was made with love and humour. Tim Arnold’s album and film ‘Super Connected' is a surreal art work - a musical film questioning of one of the most important issues of our time…technology’s intrusion into our lives and minds.
Tim shows the overwhelming and multi-various form of our technological experience that leaves us ambivalent and conflicted - because our world is volatile with change and can never be the same again. Technological potential is being manifested at the speed of light both for good and for evil - too fast for many to learn and adapt. The potential for power and control over a naive population is casting a dark shadow.
But implicit in Tim’s art work is the issue of how to own a free, independent ‘mind' within a culture of intrusive technology which, by the way, is mimicking the ‘natural' superconnectivity of all life…the quantum field of infinite potential….our creative source and to which we are inevitably ‘Super Connected'.
Val Charlton, SFX Model Maker (Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail ,Life of Brian, Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit)
His aggregators say that Apple will accept the album if he excludes the track in question, but he says it is key to the album concept.
It’s a humorous poke at how digital services embed themselves into our music and our lives by inserting adverts into them. [Apple’s response] supports the very point Arnold is making with his album: tech companies and streaming services don’t have a sense of humour.
An open letter calling on Apple to reverse the ban has been signed by a number of names in the entertainment business, including Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson, and Spandau Ballet songwriter Gary Kemp.
You can see the ‘ad’ here:
And watch the accompanying music video below.
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