Published in News

Apple’s U2 cock up

by on15 September 2014

Worst promo in history

Apple’s deal with the aged Irish rock gods, U2 is turning into the worst promo in history. Tim Cook and Bono announced that every iTunes user would be given the band’s new album for free. While that might not sound like a bad thing, if you like U2, some of the younger Apple fanboys are getting miffed about the deal.

U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, shows up in iTunes libraries as purchased, whether users have chosen to buy it or not. Thanks to Apple’s genius iTunes software, it is nearly impossible to get rid of the album. Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhones automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phones since Tuesday. This is even if you have not chosen automatic downloads.

It will always be shown as part of your music library, even if you delete all the tracks. The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your “iTunes in the Cloud” purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list. Even then the evil U2 malware, er album will lurk in your account, hidden until you decide you want it.

Samung tried a similar promo with Jay Z’s but it had the good sense to require customers had to choose to download an app to download the album. This meant that only Samsung customers who were interested in Jay Z’s new album got to download it. Apple’s tactic forced the album upon hundreds of millions of people and made it impossible to get rid of it.

In addition, it means that U2 has artificially pumped up the numbers for its “album sales.” It has been estimated that there are 150 million sales of the album. The band’s last album, No Line on the Horizon, sold 5 million copies. Fortunately giving away the album free means that Songs of Innocence will not be eligible for listing on the Billboard Charts until its physical release October 14.

But the whole thing is bad for Apple, which has angry users and bad for U2 – your can't have your album being the focus for people’s anger when they discover they can’t delete it.

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