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That U2 Apple Stunt Wasn't the Disaster You Might Think It Was
journovampire writes with this interesting bit about the fallout of U2's partnership with Apple. "Remember U2's album giveway with Apple at the end of last summer? And how the world seemed to become very annoyed that its contents had been "pushed" to their devices without permission? Well, the naysayers might have been loud – but that hasn't stopped the stunt having a lasting effect on the band's popularity. That’s according to new research from retail insight experts Kantar in the US, which shows that nearly a quarter (24%) of all US music users on iOS devices in January listened to U2, nearly five months after Songs Of Innocence was released for free onto 500m iPhones across the world. In a survey of iOS users, Kantar found that more than twice the percentage of people listened to U2 in January than listened to the second-placed artist, Taylor Swift (11%)."
Music, like sex, is a young person's affair. Just drop it after 40, nobody wants to hear it, and no one wants to think about it.
Those of us in science use the lower-case "m" for "milli" - or 1/1000. Hence 500m would be 1/2, and I'm prety sure more than 1/2 of one person recieved the rolled-out U2 music.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Not actually trying to troll, I realize there will be people who claim to have listened to it 'by accident', but I have to wonder how many people actually did listen to it accidentally by hitting 'shuffle all' on their music collection?
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
How does that relate to listens on Spotify/Pandora, concert attendance, or other album sales? You know, how the band actually makes money.
They just proved that even if you give their music away for free, three out of four people hate U2.
c. U2 is a "dad band", in that it really only appeals to people who are in the 40+ age bracket. This also happens to be what iDevices are increasingly seen as "dad-tech", something your dad tells you is the "best choice for everything" which you know is obviously wrong but fuck it, you'll take the free phone anyway since he's paying for it.
Not asking permission is theft. The playback devices are owned by their OWNERS, not the company that they connect with to download content. Pushing content onto it, rather than asking for permission to push content is stealing the playback device and using it for your own purposes.
No one likes someone stealing my electronics, even if they add give it right back after they fiddle with it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Ok, so fast lesson in behavioral psychology. If someone performs a bad behavior and you reward them, they will perform the same behavior again. Rewarding bad behavior is not how we stop this shit from happening, in fact it does the exact opposite.
I am one of those who listened to U2 thanks to Apple as recent as last week. Why? Well when I click my microphone switch (on the headphones) to hang up a call, if I don't do it just right in comes ITunes and starts playing U2. Or my phone will occasionally "pocket dial" the music app and it will start playing U2. If I could delete or turn off the music app, I would. (Actually if I bury it in a directory on an unused page, I'm sure that would help.). So the statistics really needs to be those who listened to U2 willingly vs those who didn't.
Taylor Swift sucking and U2 having been passable back in the 80s, does it?
I mean, one of the filler tracks on War is better than anything she has ever recorded.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I was clicking on it over and over in different ways in an attempt to erase it. So yes I listened to that song way more than taylor swift or pretty much any other song.
Sure you complain on the internet, you join a group of others doing the same thing, you feel like you are part of some grand movement... However you just some whispers in the wind.
In short you may get some media notice, But if the grand scheme comes down to the hard numbers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
U2, sitting innocuously near the bottom of your Artist list, it always syncs and whenever it comes up on random you're reminded yet again to go sort that shit out, but you always forget. And the cycle continues.
Yeah, it had a lasting effect: it made me hate them even more, the arrogant pretentious bastards...
"I love you, and I hope your own children treat you in the same way you have treated me".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I remember the world being surprised to mildly annoyed at best, surprised in the "did they (Apple) really do that, seems rude not to ask" sense. Very annoyed was definitely a minority. And of course those thinking it rude and those mildly annoyed included folks who had purchased U2 albums in the past, including the distant past. Those not interested at all seemed to delete it and calmly share sentiments such as "I hope Apple doesn't make a habit of this", a bit short of very annoyed.
So no, its not surprising that a lot of people listened to the album once they found it on their device, despite its "rude" delivery.
Yep, in the grand old days of radio when they played vinyl records over the air this type of behavior was known as "Payola". It was considered bad, if not outright illegal. But hey, if you enjoy having Apple decide what you are going to listen to you can save your precious brain power for important things like picking which Starbucks you're going to drink your flat white at. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So now Apple has your implied permission to do it again.
People with an IQ know that 500M = 500 Million. 500m = 0.500 Everyone else are low IQ losers and what is wrong with the world.
Actually the low IQ losers are the ones who read things in an absolute sense. Those with higher IQs are more interpretive and use context and are more tolerant of minor capitalization typos.
Getting all upset over the mis-capitalization is more a sign of some degree of compulsive disorder than high IQ.
Blog walking salam kenal admin monggo sareng sareng tindak dateng web kulo toko jam tangan
And no amount of public relations stunts is going to change that.
U2 used to rage against authority. Now they cozy up to it. And that
is one reason they suck now. The other reason is that their music is
overproduced and too slick, and Paul Hewson ( AKA a douche who pretends his name is
Bono and wears blue glasses ) is too wrapped up in his own fame.
By the way the Slashdot site remake is a pathetic failure. It doesn't render correctly on ANY
of the browsers I use. You idiots could fuck up a wet dream.
U2: the band of hipster dufuses.
I don't know how we're supposed to draw inferences about popularity based on giving things away for free. You want to compare an artist that gave an album for free to 500 million people (prompting an outcry from people who didn't want it) to one where people actually had to deliberately buy her music. Shockingly, people listen to things that are free. I listen to free music on the radio and on Pandora, but that doesn't mean I necessarily like it that much. Sometimes the criteria for leaving it on is just it being acceptable enough that changing it isn't more important than whatever else I'm doing.
.
Of course there are going to be more people listening to the album, whether by accident or intent. The album resides on more devices. For all we know, cats could be listening to it (and if you search youtube, you'll probably find a video of a cat listening to the album).
In order to determine whether or not the stunt was actually a success, you need to look at the future U2 sales increase or decrease vs. the negative effects of the backlash.
The cited survey does none of that.
Taylor fucking Swift?? Come on! That is so Middle America Teen Pop bullshit!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
that U2 live in the past. Joshua Tree, Boy, and even Zooropa were great albums, because they spoke to a specific time and place. I'm not a huge fan of their music, but I can certainly appreciate what they brought to pop music at the time. For that reason I'll listen to them every now and again.
But this latest Apple album is just an attempt to re-do Joshua Tree. I mean, if the Edge started playing the Keytar and succeeded in making it cool, or Bono stopped writing songs with abstract lyrics, that could be new and interesting. But if people want to listen to Joshua tree, everyone can listen to Joshua tree.
The best classics are classics because they encompass a specific time and place. U2 had their time and place, did it really well, and now they either need to do something completely new (at the risk of their legacy), or go enjoy their royalty cheques for the rest of their lives, doing reunion shows whenever Bono needs a new private jet.
When? All I remember was a standard pro 'authorities need to do something' line. Never once 'authorities have too much power'.
They always sucked.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Cat listens to U2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5LEG3uEKTs
Having that group that is named after a US Spy plane or the texting version of "You Too" - whatever - next to my Wynton Marsalis albums shows me one of the many things that is wrong with the World.
Like, marketable mediocrity is rewarded vastly more than virtuosity. And it's not just music either: the tech industry is just as bad.
I played Joshua Tree a few times, and then listened to some Achtung Baby. Their newer music is good, it's just not my thing. Also, I don't have an i-device so I don't know why I'm posting.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
They don't realize that even if they drew some people in, they did PR damage to the rest of the populace. And THOSE future buyers are MORE inclined to never U2 album. They have destroyed part of their possible market place.
This is like in politics where you do something insane to get more die-hard conservatives on your side, but you alienate both the democrats and more importantly, the moderates! You've damaged your ability to attract more sales in the future, by playing dirty to get sales in the present.
c. U2 is a "dad band", in that it really only appeals to people who are in the 40+ age bracket. This also happens to be what iDevices are increasingly seen as "dad-tech", something your dad tells you is the "best choice for everything" which you know is obviously wrong but fuck it, you'll take the free phone anyway since he's paying for it.
As one of those folks in the 40+ age bracket...
1) Back when us old farts were teenagers, U2 was considered somewhat revolutionary (and in a way they were). The music itself? Compared to the mass of dreck we had thrust upon our ears via radio in the 1980s? It wasn't half bad, but there was better out there (you just had to really go look for the good shit, in an age where the HTTP protocol didn't exist and the Internet was unknown to 99.99999% of the planet. This meant buying a shitload of blank cassettes, a wide circle of friends, and having a boom box with cassette-to-cassette recording capability.)
2) I once felt the same way towards my old man's 60's/70's Psychedelic/ProgRock collection (played on reel-to-reel no less!) that you feel towards a 1980's has-been band. However, my ears, like the rest of me, grew up - I inherited his collection, and after a cursory listen-through, am ripping the hell out of some of those reels to the audio-in on my home desktop machine (Thank Heavens for Audacity on Linux...) Good news, though! Old stuff, new stuff, in-between stuff... it doesn't matter to me any more; I find good stuff in every era, to the point where I have 78 RPM 'vinyl' with stuff I've ripped to FLAC. Mind you, I'm typing this as some rather kickass German industrial rock is pumping into my headset. Before that, The Temptations' Power was playing. Jazz musicians call it the act of having 'Big Ears', where you find and love good music from practically every genre. Someday, you'll get that too.
3) One fine day, *your* kids will point at your current favorite tech and laugh their asses off, as surely as I once laughed my ass off at inheriting my parents' old Amstrad 2286 (complete with maths co-processor!) and its dot-matrix printer... in 1997. Deny it all you want, I don't mind... I know different. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Most people when they're young are rather tribal about their musical tastes as they see it as significantly defining them, no only as who they are but as who they're not.
However once we grow up and become full rounded adults then music simply becomes another form of media entertainment and we no longer limit ourselves to metal/rap/r&b/whatever but listen to anything we like.
And thats a good thing.
Be careful, this was worded to make it seem bigger than it really is.
So, this was pushed on 500 million iOS devices (the iPad and iPod touch still exist) worldwide but 24% of U.S.A. iOS users listened to it. That doesn't equal 125 million people listening to U2.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
How can they know what people are actually listening to on their private devices?
I still don't understand why people flipped about this. You got a free album from a real band (your preference for/against U2 will vary). I do like U2, so I'm sure I'm biased towards them, but I can tell you I haven't listened to the album at all. It's nice I got it for free, but I can turn off the sync and no big deal. Not on my phone, not in my custom playlists. If you don't like it, who cares. Stop whining. I don't like Country, but if I got a free country album I'd say 'That's cool' and never listen to it. No one trampled on your rights or raped your ears.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Really a free album from a band that everyone has heard of and has had decades of hits?
How dare you.
It was only the "cool" kids that complained. Most people didn't care or thought it was a good thing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Personally, the U2 thing demonstrated to me that I can't trust iTunes (and therefore Apple) very much, and so it is a good reason to avoid purchasing devices that need to use it. Whether or not people actually listened to the songs does not measure whether or not this was a good thing for Apple to do.
Any negative effects this has are probably completely negated by getting their music to people that otherwise wouldn't have listened. If consumers are upset at anybody it would probably be Apple and it's not like their sales have plummeted since this.
I love the new U2 album. Seriously. Very happy to have received it for free. Some great songs there.
So this was a "success". Does this mean that I can look forward to culling whatever crap that Mr. Deep Pockets has paid Apple to push to my device? Free shit is still shit.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/credits
Thank them instead, buy 'em a beer.
Is no one else upset that your iphone is reporting back to apple and their affiliates what music you are listening to?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
In general I don't understand why we should care about U2 popularity when it sounds like Apple fucked up. :)
Apple didn't have any popularity with me beforehand either though.
question: where is the control group of people with an iPhone/iPod and who were not force-pushed the album ? or were force-pushed a Placebo ?
This is my dad with The Beach Boys. And it is me with Pearl Jam. Something about the music we listened to in our late teens is just embedded into our brains.
Kantar’s survey showed that nearly every iOS device user who listened to U2 in January 2015 – 95% – played at least one track from Songs Of Innocence.
What is "played?" Does it include all the users who didn't realize their iDevice had been unilaterally infected with Songs of Innocence, and who hit skip just as fast they can when U2's intrudes uninvited into a shuffle mix?
In some act of Quantum Physics, worthy of a Douglas Adams story, I'm pretty certain that this is why Zoo Station, one of the most amazing U2 Tribute bands will be performing at McTeague's Saloon on St. Patrick's Day from 8pm. (1237 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA, 415-776-1237)
[UID-HeinzIntel]
"nearly a quarter (24%) of all US music users on iOS devices in January listened to U2"
Poor bastards.
U2 were cool when War was released came out, but by Joshua Tree they had crossed over, and it was all over with Zooropa. Since then, it's been 20 years of trying too hard...
So they managed to shift the focus and turned out to be too good for even regular /.ers, except you.
did the user only play a U2 song because it was the only album on the entire phone?
I've 'listened' to the album in the sense that it's the only album on my device not in my Spotify app, and if nothing is queued it defaults to that album. So yes U2, you're so punk rock by pissing people off. I didn't really care that much when it was pushed to my device, but now this will give Bono and the rest of the crap artists incentive to try a similar stunt. Going to go actively remove the album from my device now.
This just goes to show, bands allowing their music to be pirated are just doing themselves a favor and getting more exposure, right?