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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
I should take my Mac into the shower to wash away any remaining traces...but that might void the warranty.
You'll get over it.
If this album is 100 Mbytes at AT&T's roaming price of $19.95 per megabyte, this is going to cost me $1,995. The album is on my phone so I hope it downloaded over a week ago! If not, I'm screwed because this is a work phone. They were fine with me checking email a few times the last time I traveled, but that was only $45 in overage fees. This is going to be very profitable for AT&T and other providers.
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.
U2 didn't pay a dime, Apple paid them.
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.
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?
it could have been nickelback....
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.
I've had Steam put promotional stuff in my library automatically on a couple of occasions.
to, Yeah Yeah Yeah!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sell the cards (they'll typically only get you a few cents, but it adds up and it gets them out of your account), trade the coupons with your friends for coupons that actually interest you (a friend had a 90% off coupon for a game this weekend that semi-interested me). The coupon gave me a game for 70 cents, and my card sales paid for that.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Hasnt happened to me, but yes i would bitch about that too. Dont put stuff in MY library that i didnt ask for. This is a MAJOR Information Age problem that needs to be stopped now. Offer it to me for free, just dont insert it into my library without my permission.
Good-bye
Some people take curating their libraries much more seriously than you do. I choose what goes into my media libraries, not Apple.
Good-bye
Well, given that I listen pretty much exclusively to classical music, finding the new U2 album on my iPhone (if I had one) or on my Mac in iTunes would be more like waking up and seeing that my ex-wife's sister is in bed with me. Ewww....
But on a serious note, this behavior by Apple is very unpolite, regardless of whether the album is pushed onto one's phone, computer, or cloud account.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
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.
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.
This strikes me as simply the next logical step in marketing. U2 is a major group, and it's hard to argue that giving customers their new album as a bonus is a bad thing. But the next step will be "free" albums Apple wants you to listen to, and the one after that will be extorting artists to pay them to have their albums released this way.
The final step, no doubt, will be an extra fee to have automatic installation of such stuff disabled.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You're incompetent or lying.
To download the album your Mac Minis would have to a) have iTunes running, and b) have end-users tell iTunes to download the songs. Unlike an iPhone, there is no auto-download setting on a Mac. Hell, I can't even get the "check for Available Downloads" menu option to download new episodes for my season passes to TV shows, I have to load the iTunes store, go to "purchased," and then manually select the TV season/album/whatever I want to download.
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. Which means even if you're using the very first, circa 2005, PPC version, of the Mac Mini you should have 6 GB free. The entire U2 album is only 109 MB.
"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.
> 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 a FREE ALBUM. Apple rolled the cost into every phone it sells; you paid for the album whether you wanted it or not.
They know that ALL their users are U2 fans. Every. Single. One.
And from this point on, if someone says they bought an iPhone you can say to their face that they are U2 fans, even if they deny it. Because Apple SAYS they are U2 fans, and to them that is the word of their god.
Task Mangler
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.
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.
Incorrect. In iTunes there's a prominent "X" displayed on the upper right corner of the album. Click it. The album is gone.
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.
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
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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"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman