U2 Threatens to Release Album Early on iTunes

Uninvited Guest writes "After a rough cut of U2's latest unfinished album was stolen earlier this week, the band has vowed to release the entire album on iTunes if the music appears on P2P networks. Bono told the London Daily Telegraph, 'If it is on the Internet this week, we will release it immediately as a legal download on iTunes, and get hard copies into the shops by the end of the month.' Is this the exact opposite of the Smashing Pumpkins' last album, which the band rushed to release on P2P networks, before it could hit the stores?"

Comments

sooo?

[the_argent]

If it's available for free on P2P networks, we'll make it available for people to buy online?

Just don't get that.........

Re:sooo?

[ggvaidya]

Presumably, the "real fans" will then buy it on iTunes rather than getting it from their favourite P2P program.

Re:sooo?

[GlassHeart]

If it's available both legally and illegally, fans will be faced with the same old choice. History tells us that a good number still choose to buy.

However, if it's available only illegally, then a fan who wants to hear the album has no choice but to break the law. Having acquired the music, the fan will be less likely to pay for it when it is released legally.

Once you understand that this is not meant for the people who never would've paid for it, the logic becomes quite simple.

Re:sooo?

[Vellmont]

What choice do they have if it gets to P2P before any other channel? If they didn't release it on iTunes the ONLY way to get it would be illegally through P2P. Many people that would have just bought the album (given no other choice) would take that route. On the other hand if they release it on iTunes you capture part of that DL market. They were obviously already going to release it on iTunes at a later date, so there's no compromise of distributor deals, etc.

In other words you can either compete with the black market, or just roll over and play dead. U2 has decided to compete.

Re:sooo?

[BlueCup]

What's sad is it's the "real" fans that are going to be hurt by this. The fans that care enough about only hearing the finished product... to me this is like U2 pissing on their fans, all in the interest of making a few extra bucks.

Re:sooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

No chance but to break the law? Are you serious. How about exercising the slightest bit of self-restraint and waiting another 2 weeks. Oh I forgot, there is nothing we shouldn't have for free and damnit we deserve it right? I feel sorry for you.

Re:sooo?

[afidel]

You imply that U2 has never had a good album without the machine. I would definitly not agree with that. The Joshua Tree is one of the top albums of all time.

Re:sooo?

[SillyNickName4me]

Heh, and if I go for what such polls say I'd be listening to a lot more crap then I do.

I suggest listening with your ears (and brain), not with your eyes..

Or in other words, such lists can be very nice for suggestions, but wont tell you what is good or not. Add to that the fact that most people don't have a clue about the difference between good/bad music and like/dislike.

Re:sooo?

[GlassHeart]

[...] no choice but to break the law? Rethink that and call me in the morning.

Learn to separate a realistic expectation of human nature from condoning such. People break laws all the time, and you've probably broken speed limits several times. If you did, then you probably did it because you wanted to get somewhere more quickly, there was no legal way to do so, and the chances of getting caught and punished are slim.

I was trying to explain why U2 thought this was a sensible thing to do, because somebody asked. I was trying to predict what would happen, not trying to justify what hasn't even happened. Do you actually disagree that their album sales are likely to be hurt otherwise?

Re:sooo?

[beowulfcluster]

U2 songs don't reach their ultimate potential before they've played them live for a while anyway. I have all their albums on cd but I pretty much only listen to live bootlegs and rips from the live dvds since almost everything is better live. I think I'm a so called 'real fan' but I won't feel let down by this as long as there's a live dvd from the coming tours!

Re:sooo?

[allgood2]

That's true, but not exactly U2's fault. Technically speaking, the original album planned for November will NEVER be produced, and that's due to someone stealing it. They could proceed on a normal timeline but everything would be tainted by the theft. Not bad or good, just tainted, sometimes these things can throw artist into hyper-overdrive and what they produce in the aftermath is incredible. Other times, a great big sucking sound of their creative energy gets tied up in the thought of the theft, and whatever is produced afterwards is just halfhearted.

I come to this from two sides, I downloaded the Lillywhite Session from the Dave Matthews band, and purchased Busted Stuff when it came out. While I fully enjoy the Lillywhite Sessions for what they are, in fact often enjoy them more than I do Busted Stuff, I do also recognize that they are not finish material. For the band to "complete" the album, they had to totally re-envision the songs, and in that since Busted Stuff is good and great to have as a comparison and contrast of what happens when creative vision is derailed.

I think U2's desire is to get something out that they feel is close to a finish product rather than having an album out for months that isn't near what they wanted the final album to be. For me that's a respectable decision. For their part, they've vowed to work rapidly on the album, canceling vacation plans and other activities so they could finish it at a reasonable production level. Note, I say production level, because it could be months or years, before whatever creative impulses that drove them to do this album return to a level that would be good enough to allow them to proceed "normally."

U2 encouraging p2p?

[prof_peabody]

I think this just promotes a P2P release. Post it and we'll release it, almost a reward to the fans...

Re:U2 encouraging p2p?

[Vellmont]

Actually I almost wonder if the whole thing isn't a publicity stunt. It certainly has increased the media coverage of an album release that otherwise would have had about none. I for one would have had no idea U2 has released another album.

Re:U2 encouraging p2p?

[Skidge]

Oh, you would have heard about it, once a song gets picked and played over and over and over again in every possible venue, like Beautiful Day off the last album--especially with the olympics coming up, which also happened to correspond with their last album release.

Speed up long awaited releases?

[angrist]

Ok, now someone please steal the next Tool record so we can all get it a couple months early.

Tonight's task

[Chairboy]

As someone who would like to hear the music soon, I'll be at home recording tracks of me singing 'yay, can't wait for itunes. C'mon bono, release it to itunes. La la la la!' for 4 and 5 minutes each, then name them after the album and use the songlist from Amazon.com.

Stage 2, post them to P2P programs but prevent anyone from succesfully downloading them.

Stage 3, wait until someone hired by the record agency finds them listed and assumes the worst. Presto! The songs are released to iTunes weeks early.

Mission accomplished.

Don't understand

[rokzy]

if it's a rough cut, then it won't be as good as the one you can buy.

if it's a practically perfect copy, then why haven't they released it already? (hint: outdated distributed method defended by useless middlemen unwilling to die gracefully)

maybe they're scared that p2p will allow people to "try before you buy", and just want people to be able to pay for it before they've heard it, cf MPAA wanting mobiles banned because people can talk to friends about crap movies as soon as they've seen it.

Two words:

[vegetablespork]

Publicity. Stunt.

U2 sucks now anyways...

[Mitleid]

I'm usually not one to listen to popular music (not that I'm knocking it or anything.) Organic instuments never really appealed to me, but U2 is one of the few popular bands that I could always seem to get into. My musical tastes are mostly aggressive electronic music (industrial: Skinny Puppy, Haujobb, yadda yadda), so maybe I'm not the right person to be giving a critique on U2, but as far as I see things they've just totally sold out and shown that they seriosuly have no clue.

For example, take the release of their albumb POP back in 1997 or something. It was an interesting albumn; it sorta picked up where Zooropa had left off. It was a lot more "experimental" (at least for them) and just by listening to it I sort of got the felling that U2 didn't really give a fuck and just wanted to make the music they were inspired to make. Well, the critics and many of the fans totally wrote the album off as too "electronic", and a few years later U2 releases the completely horrid All That You Can't Leave Behind, which I never even had any interest in at all, but the songs I did hear were just so boring and cookie cutter. But the kicker is that the album went on to sell VERY well, not to mention a US tour with people willing to sell their momma's own titty just to get a ticket. Shocking!

Anyway, I think the "threat" of putting their new album on iTunes because it's been stolen just shows how out of touch celebrities get when they hit the big time. And I don't mean just famous; I mean HUGE. U2 has been a big band for nearly 20 years now, if not more, and as far as the politics that they might have been aligning themselves with before that association is obviously completely gone. Personally, I don't believe in that shit anyway, as politics in popular forms of entertainment seems to me to be just another marketing tool, but that's my own take on things.

Priorities

[realStrategos]

"French police have launched a major operation to find the disc."

I just realized how screwed up this world really is. A major police operation has been launch to find a CD. Aparantly all other crimes have been defeated.

Threatened? Vowed?

[Chuck Chunder]

How about a simple "said"?
There is no justification for the emotive terms "threatened" or "vowed".

Screw You and Our Fans Too

[Mulletproof]

"After a rough cut of U2's latest unfinished album was stolen earlier this week, the band has vowed to release the entire album on iTunes if the music appears on P2P networks."

...Yeah, and????

I mean, is that a threat? Because I truely am baffled. "By golly, since somebody stole our copy, we'll release the entire damn thing on iTunes!" Ok, so we're going to punish the large majority of our innocent fanbase who still easily outnumber the .mp3 wired, deny ourselves a huge revenue stream and put it strait to digital format so the pirates don't have to work too hard to get it.

Aside from the potential bonus of making iTunes more popular, there's no freakin' logic to this action. Millions of people who have never downloaded a song in their lives are being cut out of the loop for.... Uh, what was that reasoning again???

Yeah... You go U2. Show em who's boss. ^_^

Mod up!

[TheSpoom]

+1, Insightful

Huzzah for major bands being more important than violent criminals.

Re:I don't get it

[Colonel Angus]

The Beatles were also head and shoulders a better band than U2. Personally, I can't stand them. Joshua Tree, great... since then it's just been ass.

To my knowledge, one of the biggest bands to rely on bootlegs and such are the Grateful Dead. They weren't big on studio work and there are shitloads of bootlegs available. A buddy of mine in high school was a huge Dead fan and had 4 shoeboxes full of bootleg tapes.

Metallica once thrived on bootlegs to get recognition. Then they got it and decided that it was a bad thing. That is a band that has lost a lot of respect from a large portion of long-time fans and they're not likely to win many back.

Re:What?

[anon*127.0.0.1]

You are, as you said, a solitary representative. Do you think every person who downloaded those files went out and bought the album the first week it came out? Probably not. Probably quite a few of them intended to buy the album, but they didn't quite have the money, or they saw something in the store they liked better, or they decided that the songs really weren't that great after all... for whatever reason, because they were able to download the songs before they were able to buy them, Rush lost a sale. Why didn't Rush complain? They probably didn't want to let everyone know that the songs were available on P2P.

and you're complaining because....?

[bonovoxpsu]

of all the bands to bash, you're going after u2?

a band that has said it doesn't care about people downloading their albums, as long as they don't make a profit on it... they've actually released concert bootlegs for people to download - legally!

they do understand that the more people listening to their music the better - they are one of the bands that "gets it". the big issue here is they're worried about unfinished demos hitting the internet and people getting a wrong taste of their new album. this isn't a band that is worthy of slashdot bashing.

but then, my handle tends to give away my bias ;)

Simple logic?

[Skadet]

However, if it's available only illegally, then a fan who wants to hear the album has no choice but to break the law.
[...]the logic becomes quite simple.

Speaking of logic, you committed the fallacy of the false dichotomy. A fan who wants to hear the album DOES have a choice: wait. Or download illegally.

Downloading is never the ONLY option.