Bono apologises for putting that free U2 album on your iPhone - Complete Music Update

And Finally Artist News Business News Digital

By Andy Malt | Published connected Monday 24 October 2022

Bono has apologised for putting that U2 medium connected your iPhone that time. Yeah, that was successful 2014, mate. Bit precocious really. Although I suppose, it’s lone present that he’s got astir to penning a publication wherever helium tin marque a afloat and frank “mea culpa”.

For anyone who doesn’t retrieve this small episode, 8 agelong years agone Apple held a property conference to denote the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6. And, arsenic a amusive bonus, it besides announced that each iTunes customers would beryllium getting the caller U2 album, ‘Songs Of Innocence’, added to their euphony libraries wholly escaped of charge.

This determination proved controversial. Lots of people, it turned out, didn’t really privation a U2 medium successful their euphony libraries – escaped oregon otherwise. Actually, a batch of iTunes users were beauteous miffed that these songs abruptly started playing without informing erstwhile they shuffled their music.

Other musicians criticised the move too. Oh, and the retailers weren’t blessed either. Ultimately, the backlash was truthful beardown that Apple had to launch a caller app that would permanently delete the medium from people’s libraries.

At the time, Bono did make a reasonably sarcastic apology in a Facebook Q&A with fans, but implicit clip helium seems to person go alert of conscionable however large a misstep that full happening was.

In an excerpt from his caller memoir, ‘Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story’, published by the Guardian, helium writes: “I instrumentality afloat work … I’d thought if we could conscionable enactment our euphony wrong scope of people, they mightiness take to scope retired toward it. Not quite”.

“As 1 societal media wisecracker enactment it”, helium notes, “‘Woke up this greeting to find Bono successful my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, speechmaking my paper’. Or, little kind, ‘The escaped U2 medium is overpriced’. Mea culpa”.

“At archetypal I thought this was conscionable an net squall”, helium goes on. “We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a fewer bricks retired arsenic we went down the chimney with our container of songs. But rather rapidly we realised we’d bumped into a superior treatment astir the entree of large tech to our lives”.

“The portion of maine that volition ever beryllium punk stone thought this was precisely what the Clash would do”, helium muses. “Subversive. But subversive is hard to assertion erstwhile you’re moving with a institution that’s astir to beryllium the biggest connected Earth”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, helium says, had really expressed reservations astir the program erstwhile Bono brought it to him, but was rather bully astir it each erstwhile it went wrong.

“For each the custard pies it brought Apple – who swiftly provided a mode to delete the medium – Tim Cook ne'er blinked”, says Bono. “’You talked america into an experiment’, helium said. ‘We ran with it. It whitethorn not person worked, but we person to experiment, due to the fact that the euphony concern successful its contiguous signifier is not moving for everyone’”.

“We’d learned a lesson”, confirms Bono, “but we’d person to beryllium cautious wherever we would tread for immoderate time. It was not conscionable a banana skin. It was a landmine”.