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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.
If you buy a product from Apple, it's not really yours. Oh, you own the lump of hardware, but the apps, the content, the OS? No, you do not own any of that.
Test 1 2 3 4
It downloaded over wi-fi on my phone.
I had to actually start my download because I turn OFF THE ABILITY TO AUTOMATICALLY DOWNLOAD!!!
I swear, the more technology we get the dumber people become. Stop yer damn whining and delete the FREE ALBUM.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I'm interested in the thread. But not in the original story, per se. Your extreme outrage - that someone would question your status as a victim - is intriguing. Often people who do bad things justify their actions by claiming to be the victim. Perhaps you've done some very bad things lately?
If you leave automatic downloads on - guess what - you have automatic downloads!
I think it was a great thing to have the album right at your fingertips. This is not some cheap promo song of some re-released stuff of some ex-famous guy. This is a full-blown U2 album with a song about Joey Ramone!
I'd be happy to have that kind of album from your preferred musical genre im my library anytime, so please stop pretending to be offended.
They have? I haven't gotten any free books. I think you're making shit up.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If your Mac is running out of hard drive room from downloading a single album, I think the album is probably the least of your problems.
In your view, the fact that people were given for free a piece of music is something they should rightfully complain about? Without us making fun of them?
Strange view you have there.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I want my libraries to contain stuff I CHOOSE, not stuff chosen for me. This a going to become an ever increasing problem as companies like Apple want the store and player blended so you always have opportunity to buy something.
Good-bye
It should have never been added to my personal library in the first place. THAT is the issue, something being placed into my library that i did not ask for. Its a huge 'fuck you' to the users.
Good-bye
I thought this album release was quite significant actually. Many years ago Courtney Love wrote on Salon.com ("Courtney Love does the math") that she was not bothered with P2P distribution of her music, as in fact CD sales were not a source of income for artists. Every now and again the publishers associations whine about how artists will perish due to P2P, and on /. there is disagreement with no proper evidence to support it. Now we see a well established band and Apple showing that revenue sharing with a publisher for printing CDs that may or may not be bought is not the best deal they could have.
Opt-in and UI preferences aside, this album was a major release.
I for one would much prefer a bag of crap to a U2 album.
Totally. Because U2 are your typical, just about getting by, rock band.
U2 don't have to sell another album, ever, to remain multi-millionaires. They could give away their work for nothing for the rest of their lives, and still be richer than 99.99% of the planet. They are not, in any way, a template for other musicians.
"More importantly everybody knows Mac OS X needs multiple gigabytes free as memory swap space on it's startup disk. The general recommendation is 15% of the drive"
Emphasis mine
They may be lying but you are also being dishonest claiming that EVERYONE knows OS X needs 15% free space. I'm sure the number of people that know it is much closer to "No one" than "Everyone"
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Having "auto download" turned on has been perfectly fine for non idiots who've managed their library themselves until this unexpected meddling by someone else. Now, of course, the non idiots will have to turn what they might have felt was a useful feature off since we've learnt that Apple will be using it as a promotional tool.
You can control the timing of your downloads. Turn off data roaming, which is a good idea on any smartphone if roaming charges are excessive. You can disable automatic downloads of music and other content. But most importantly: you can choose whether or not automatic downloads occur over the cellular network (roaming or not); the default setting is to disallow this.
Apple was a bit naughty by pushing an album we didn't ask for, but that's all it is: well-intended spam. No need to be overly dramatic about Apple owning our devices, and no worrying about racking up insane roaming charges.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
> how can you download software patches
When you want to, when you have cleared some space and you're ready. Just like you should be able to choose when to download anything, and how to use your disk drive space.
It's not going to cost you anything unless you went into Settings > iTunes & App Store and told it to use mobile data for automatic downloads. That's off by default, which means it only performs these kinds of downloads if it's connected to the Internet by WiFi.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Revenues are up almost 50% since Job's years. There have been several successful products launched and Apple is much more heavily embedded in the global mobile ecosystem. So yes.
It's not a FREE ALBUM. Apple rolled the cost into every phone it sells; you paid for the album whether you wanted it or not.
If you dont know the basics about computers, you dont deserve to own one.
That's a pretty harsh way of looking at it. You can't even get through a public education these days w/o access to a computer. There a lot of senior citizens (my aunts and uncles in their 70s and 80s are all online), who just want to send email, and surf the web. Why the fuck should they have to know what swap space is?
Just another day in Paradise
There seems to be a permanent shift in the younger generation not owning music. I don't know that piracy is the problem. My daughter and her friends (all teenagers) don't pirate but they, with very few exceptions for which those services don't work, don't buy music on a per song or per album basis. Rather they subscribe to services or get ads via. things like Pandora, youtube and Spotify.
My generation which was enculturated to buy music still buys. But I think we are talking about a true cultural shift where younger people see music like TV shows as something they wouldn't own for a lifetime.
Four things happened:
- Apple pushed something on us that we did not ask for, just so that U2 could reach multi-platinum status with the latest album almost instantly.
- Apple forced the music taste of their CEO on everyone with an iTunes account. They should have set the album price to "free" and let people decide if they wanted it or not. Use their music in the iPhone 6 ads and write "U2 album available for free on iTunes until date xyz" at the end of the ad, no need for anything else.
- A lot of people have monthly data quotas, and some are always on the edge of going over it. Around 100MB might not seem like much, but on a cellphone plan of 2GB that's 5% wasted, or roughly a day and a half of data if you spread it over 30 days. Will Apple pay for the people who went over their monthly cap because of this publicity stunt? That certainly doesn't make the album "free" for those people, on the contrary.
- the iTunes algorithms make recommendations based on our purchases. Now, because of the "purchase" of this U2 album that I didn't ask for, I'll get recommendation for things I absolutely hate, which means Apple just destroyed their own recommendation system, which means I'll be ignoring recommendations from now on, which means less profits for Apple. How stupid is that.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Until a few days ago, it was a setting to automatically download PURCHASES, so having it on wouldn't be a problem as long as one didn't PURCHASE anything.
Now, apparently, it's been turned into a promotional tool, using to send SPAM to users. And for those who still would like to automatically download PURCHASES, no such option exists.