
Apple releases U2 album removal tool - schrofer
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540
======
baddox
It was a bizarre choice to throw the album into everyone's library, rather
than just feature it on the iTunes front page as a free download. They
probably wanted people to discover the album faux-serendipitously, but I feel
they showed a profound lack of understanding of (or disregard for) people's
music listening habits and preferences.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
What does this decision, vetted by dozens of executives I imagine and
definitely by Cook himself say about our Cloud-ified technological lives?

Its just crazy to me that they can just throw music into your collection
without even asking for permission. There's something really arrogant about
Apple right now. I'm not sure what other word could possibly describe this.

What boggles my mind even more is that U2, for all its popularity, is a poorly
aging nostalgia act. Heck, I'm an old Gen-X'er and I barely remember their
heyday with the Joshua Tree. Tweens and Millenials probably only see them as a
band their parents listened to. There's really something off-putting about
this. If it was Kanye or something, I could see the appeal, as he's popular
now and has a wide-range of fans, but U2? We've long outgrown stale classic
rockers and music popularity is very much not this monolithic structure
anymore. If anyone should know this, you'd think the guys who run iTunes
would.

~~~
baddox
I personally don't find it as sinister as you make it sound. It's mostly just
a user interface/experience issue. I don't see much relevance to privacy
issues or the cloudification of life.

~~~
snarkyturtle
Did you completely miss the hundreds of nude celebrity photos taken from the
cloud two weeks ago?

~~~
baddox
I'm not referring to that situation. I'm saying that I don't find any
particular relevance of the U2 situation to the celebrity photo scandal.

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idlewords
This was an interesting marketing failure. Looking at the Twitter feed for 'u2
iphone', it was clear that a lot of people took umbrage at what they thought
was an invasion of their music library, or thought they had been hacked, or
otherwise felt it was a mistake.

Then the word spread that the album had been given away for free. But U2 and
Apple had gone to great pains to explain that Apple "bought" the album for its
users as a gift.

I feel sorry for the support people who had to field calls about this stuff
this week. What a half-baked marketing stunt.

~~~
valgaze
Sounds like a pretty good deal for Interscope:

"At one point Thursday afternoon, 26 U2 titles charted simultaneously on
iTunes top 200 albums rankings, Apple and Interscope Records representatives
confirmed to Mashable on Friday. Meanwhile, U218 Singles landed in the top 10
in 46 countries."

[http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart-
apple-r...](http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart-apple-
release/)

~~~
freehunter
But it's a record with a huge asterisk, like Major League Baseball records of
players using steroids. If buying your own album in order to get it into the
charts is legitimate, I'm a millionaire because I pay myself thousands of
dollars per minute _.

_ (some of those dollars may be the same ones over and over again)

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, another way to game the system is to include your album with concert
ticket sales. That counts as a sale officially, but you probably aren't losing
many "real" sales since your fans probably have the album already.

------
fwr
[http://itunes.com/soi-remove](http://itunes.com/soi-remove)

This is a direct link. It looks like a scam website, especially the form that
pops up after you press "Remove Album". I would never trust that if I were a
person literate enough to know where not to enter your passwords, but not
enough to know about SSL certificates.

~~~
jtzhou
This is very unclear: "Once the album has been removed from your account, it
will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If
you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again."

Huh, so if I remove it from my account, it will be no longer available for a
"redownload" but then I can just "get it again"? Lots of vague sentences here.

------
Osmium
I find it fascinating how polarised a lot of the comments are. It's either:

* People will complain about anything. Why be so ungrateful? You don't like it; fine, don't listen.

* How did Apple ever think they could get away with this? It's invading my personal music library.

Fundamentally, it seems that people have very different mental models of what
a 'cloud' computing service is. For some people, it's still 'their'
music/library, and so this is an invasion. Maybe that's how it should be in an
ideal world, but it's not how it currently is. Hopefully, for these people,
they'll come away with a better understanding of some of the tradeoffs we make
when we decide to use cloud services, even if we don't realise it at the time.

This is probably all made worse because iTunes started as a non-cloud service,
but is now some weird hybrid, which is probably why there are such differing
attitudes towards it.

I think we can all agree this was a marketing fubar though. A download link
would've been much better, and hopefully Apple will realise just how confusing
their current set-up is, with even some people who _wanted_ the album not
being able to figure out how to get it...

------
chollida1
I'm guessing that this decision had a lot to do with U2 looking at their
legacy.

With this push release, they can claim their album is on the most devices
ever, most listened to album ever, etc, while still collecting a large pay
check from Apple at the same time. If apple wrote the contract in such a way
that each download is considered a sale, then U2 suddenly has the most
successful album of all time in terms of "sales".

I don't think there is anything wrong with this if its the case, but with
their history of success and age, its understandable if they start looking at
their career in terms of how they rank against bands like the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones.

To clarify for some people, this in now way is to "blame" U2 for this. I'm
just trying to see this from the U2 perspective.

~~~
jbigelow76
Blaming U2, or shifting a sizable chunk of the blame to U2, seems like Apple
apologist talk.

It just doesn't sound like Bono and The Edge (does he capitalize the "The"?)
to sit around and discuss the nuance of forced installs vs a free download. I
doubt they would be so insecure in their place in pop history to "force" one
group of specific technology users to download their album.

My personal theory is that Tim Cook wanted to have something that was "his" in
keeping the iPhone as part of the cultural zeitgeist and not just another
really good smart phone. Steve had his pursuit of the Beatles , Tim has his
"gift" of U2.

~~~
leoc
> (does he capitalize the "The"?)

Yes. Though now that U2's an Apple product maybe it's time to switch to
rounded Edges. ;)

------
serve_yay
This was such a dumb idea. Just make the thing free, and if people want it
they'll get it. Bad time to be doing anything that could be construed as
"creepy", when you're getting into the payments business.

Dumb.

~~~
vidoc
If they had done that, they could have exposed U2 to very bad PR: for example
if the number of actual downloads was ridiculously low :P

~~~
serve_yay
Indeed, so they took the PR hit themselves. How umm... noble.

------
Kronopath
After seeing this article, I looked into my music library in my iPhone, and
sure enough, there it was. What a jarring experience. Especially since I've
been wanting to clean up my music library for a while now, to get rid of old
songs that I don't listen to. I don't appreciate Apple thwarting my efforts
there.

~~~
emehrkay
Its strange because it is there, but it didn't actually download. You can
stream the songs and you can download them. Maybe they should have pushed a
notification from the music app saying "Free music if you want it"

~~~
r00fus
It's the same experience as if you'd purchased the music on one device and
viewing your purchases on another. - it's also the same experience if you use
iTunes Match on several devices - I use the streaming method a lot for those
16GB devices where I don't want all my space used up by my music collection on
iTunes Match.

------
andrewtbham
I wish they would let you delete other songs that you have bought.

~~~
jmreid
They do let you hide purchases so that they won't show up on in the music list
on iOS and iTunes. They won't let you delete a purchase, which makes sense.

It's confusing because they're using purchase history as a basis for your
entire library, which might not sync up with your mindset for your music list.
I've definitely hidden past purchases that I know I'll never need easy access
to.

~~~
andrewtbham
Ok cool. so the feature does exist.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919](http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919)

------
tuxidomasx
Don't they have to download it to everybody's library for U2 to get the credit
for a digital download/purchase?

This looks similar to the way Jay-Z sold a million+ of Magna Carta Holy Grail
a year ago. Get a deal with a smart phone company to bundle their album with
new units. Then show the RIAA the digital download stats, and bam! Platinum
status.

I guess in this case the album is pushed to existing devices, but as long as
somebody pays for the sale (even if its 'pre-bought' by a company or through a
deal) it still counts. Seems like the new way to fudge numbers.

~~~
tehwebguy
Nielsen's SoundScan rules prohibit reporting any album purchases that weren't
made for 50% or more of retail value.

That said, they broke the rules for the Lady Gaga album that Amazon sold at a
massive discount while making public statements that they _weren 't_ breaking
their own rules.

Not sure if Jay-Z's sales were counted as well but I would definitely consider
it Platinum* with an asterisk.

------
allegory
Thank goodness for this although it should be entirely unnecessary.

Both my kids turned up yesterday and asked me why the hell I put U2 on their
iPads.

------
knd775
I heard a lot of people complain that the album had been automatically added
to their library. I'm glad that they made a simple way for people with limited
knowledge to remove it.

I still don't understand why the songs were automatically added and
downloaded. Why were they not simply made available for free on iTunes?

~~~
kayoone
I think it depends on your icloud settings. If you set music to automatically
download when added to your library, the song would just pop up on your
device.

~~~
Caballera5678
Correct. The album was simply added to everyone's iTune's Library, if on your
iDevice under the iTunes & App store settings had 'Music' enabled for
'Automatic Downloads' then any new purchases (including free) would be
automatically downloaded onto your device. If you don't have that setting
enabled, the album wasn't downloaded.

------
general_failure
This is very unwarranted of Apple to push content without user permission.
Just because it's free doesn't mean I want it. There's a reason many parties
have a "no gift" policy. People don't want stuff just because it's free.

------
gnarbarian
I have this exact same problem on google music. They give you tons of free pop
stuff and I HATE almost all of it. There's no way that I have discovered to
remove it from your library either (at least from the phone's interface). This
prevents me from shuffling all the songs in my library because 90% of them are
shit pop songs I don't like.

Edit:

It appears you can remove songs one at a time. But you cannot remove entire
albums Google has added to your library. see:
[http://imgur.com/a/CrsKN](http://imgur.com/a/CrsKN)

It appears you CAN do this from the website.

~~~
dag11
I have Google Music All Access and I've never experienced Google plopping
songs/albums in my library that I didn't explicitly request.

How is this happening to you?

~~~
gnarbarian
I am also a subscriber. It's just always been there in my library. tons of
crap from kanye, john mayer, xzibit etc.. I think I've finally got most of it
cleared out. It's taken me two hours to delete everything they added via the
web interface.

~~~
tschuy
Have you perhaps logged in with a Nexus device? I know that my Nexus 7 (2012)
came with quite a bit of free media to promote the recent redo of Google
Music, Google Play TV/Movies, etc.

~~~
gnarbarian
yes. maybe that's it. I've had a galaxy nexus, a nexus 5, and two nexus 7s.

------
laurencerowe
But what if I have other U2 albums in need of removal?

~~~
Argorak
Well, in that case, you probably bought this onto yourself.

------
fakeasaur
Apple should have realized how personal music choices are for a lot of people.
Shockingly aggressive move on their part.

On the upside I got another episode of 'U Talkin' U2 to Me?'

~~~
collyw
Exactly, their whole product range is prefixed with an 'i' as in me - my
personal stuff.

------
alsetmusic
I've been (politely, but firmly) going back and forth with iTunes support on
this and had already written a draft to Tim Cook that I planned to send today.
This is welcome news.

On a side note, how likely is it that we'll ever hear a correction from U2's
record label as to the success of the launch? Spoiler: no chance.

Edit: > Bono added that Apple had "paid" for the giveaway…

I was too quick to post without reading.

------
Luc
I wonder if there is a long-term strategy behind it, and this is a first step
towards getting consumers to accept content being pushed onto their devices.
Ads, basically. By giving away a new album, they get consumers to think of
pushed content as something good, as free stuff.

Perhaps next time it will be only half of the album. Or the tracks will only
play 5 times before they're removed again.

------
misuba
Where was this tool in 1996 when we really needed it?

------
k-mcgrady
I surprised how much this pissed people off. It wasn't downloaded to your
device unless you had turned automatic downloads on - it was just added to
your iCloud. So free music not taking up any of your space. And if you did
turn on auto-download just fucking delete it. Swipe left: delete. It's not
difficult.

~~~
icebraining
It's not about the difficulty, it's about the invasion of what is considered
personal space. Even if people realize that your iCloud is on Apple's
machines, they expect to be managed and viewed by them alone.

To the pissed off, this was like your landlord entering your home while you
were away and leaving a CD as a gift. And your landlord is a multinational
company, not exactly an intimate friend.

~~~
k-mcgrady
IMO it was more like your landlord popping a free CD in your mailbox. A minor
inconvenience if you don't like the CD but nothing more.

------
mitchty
I'm guessing that whomever is responsible for this idea at Apple will no
longer have the ability to do this again.

I honestly thought to myself, did I drunkenly buy a U2 album? How much did I
drink.

Just wish I could do the same thing to remove certain free songs out of my
account for good.

------
LeicaLatte
I like free music. So it's hard for me to understand the fuss. Its still weird
to see Apple not tuning out the bad press anymore. They listen to criticisms
way more than ever.

~~~
freehunter
Most people will enjoy a free cup of coffee, but if you pour it into their lap
with no warning, they might get a little upset.

------
Scuds
I don't think there would be a similar reaction if a free game turned up in
our respective Steam libraries, ready for downloading.

~~~
collyw
Ok, I don't use either Steam or iTunes, but from what I gather it wasn't
"ready for downloading" (implying the user has some choice in the matter) but
was pushed onto the device without their knowledge.

~~~
ryukafalz
Not an Apple user, but from my understanding, it was placed in your media
library, where you could then stream it. Actually downloading it to the device
required extra steps.

------
stox
I'll just leave this here:

[http://youtu.be/fGOrm9rzm7A](http://youtu.be/fGOrm9rzm7A)

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ThePhysicist
Well, I guess you can really say that the album went "viral".

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bowlofpetunias
So, no apology?

