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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
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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