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Apple Outrages Users By Automatically Installing U2's Album On Their Devices
Zanadou writes "Apple may have succeeded at breaking two records at once with the free release of U2's latest album, titled Songs of Innocence, via iTunes. But now, it looks like it's also on track to become one of the worst music publicity stunts of all time. Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhones automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phones. But even if iTunes users hadn't chosen automatic downloads, Songs of Innocence will still be displayed as an "iTunes in the Cloud" purchase. That means it will still 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. Other reactions include rapper Tyler, The Creator saying that having the new U2 album automatically downloaded on his iPhone was like waking up with an STD. Update: 09/16 15:06 GMT by T : Note: Apple has released a fix.
Turn off automatic iTunes downloads. It's in settings iTunes .
It doesn't automatically download. The album is free in iTunes if your choose to download it. Anything else you want to worry about that isn't true?
It took me all of 5 seconds to hide the album in iTunes. All gone, I'll never see it again (unless I choose to unhide it).
Such a hardship.
I've had Steam put promotional stuff in my library automatically on a couple of occasions.
Some people take curating their libraries much more seriously than you do. I choose what goes into my media libraries, not Apple.
Good-bye
Yes it is Apple's fault. The expectation is that things the _user_ buys will be automatically downloaded, _not_ that things will download without the user doing actively something.
Your failure to understand such a basic thing makes me wonder why you are on a technology website...
This is a failure of user expectations - a obvious user interface problem.
It is also a failure of the accepted usage contract.
Sadly, it does not automatically download. Even with automatic downloads on. It automatically appears in the list of purchases and automatically appears in iTunes in the Cloud (if you have that option enabled), but it didn't automatically download.
Actually it's not the default setting...
I HAVE an iPhone 5s, and YES it was there, but, no, it wasn't downloaded... it was in my list of albums and opening the album showed it was only a one click away to download (click the download from cloud button on the album)... and as I don't use my iphone for music, (I use the old fashioned radio in my car for music) I heard about it "downloading automatically" so I went in there, oh look I have 1 album with 11 songs in my music folder... oh, they're all "Cloud" as in waiting to download... it's one button to download them all.. but it didn't use up any of my data plan...
and for the record... that was the first time I opened the music app on my iphone... so yes everything related to it was completely default...
I agree with fractoid below, it's people complaining about nothing... I could see if they downloaded a NWA album to everyone for free, or even a Beiber album... really U2 is about as inoffensive as it gets,
From 1999 to 2009, music sales dropped about 60%.
Much of that has to do with three things:
1. Many people have already purchased all the pre-1999 music they want, and now only buy new music. Prior to digital, there were a lot of replacement sales of old music.
2. It is now easy to only purchase the songs you want, so people no longer have to spend $10 for two songs, which means overall revenue is down. The solution to this is for artists to create music where every track on an album is desired.
3. "Rental" options like Spotify, Pandora, etc., don't count as sales, but are widely used by many people as their only music source.
I don't see this as a huge problem. Not particularly invasive. If you don't like U2, don't click on the cloud. If you have things set in a particular way, it might download automatically, but you can now "delete" things directly from your phone (as against the way that it used to be where you needed to do everything from iTunes); so again, not too big of a deal. OTOH, it shows up as an entry in your list of albums, which could become annoying if this were to become any sort of standard practice, but only because at some point it makes it harder to find the items which you want to be there.
In this way it isn't too much different from the new Amazon Prime Music app, which lists all the "free" streamed albums offered through Amazon Prime membership. It becomes hard to browse for something I am interested in because there are so many things that I am NOT interested in. That being said, I can't complain too much as I haven't paid for any of them (I paid for the prime membership for other reasons) and it is occasionally nice when I want to hear something that haven't thought to purchase outright. Search works well, just browsing not-so-much, and even then sometimes one _wants_ to browse through things unknown to find something new.
McFly777
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