Bono says you can blame him for that free iTunes U2 album

S. Dent@stevetdentOctober 24, 2022 1:33 AMIn this post: iTunes, news, gear, Tim Cook, Bono, album, free of chargeJustin Sullivan by way of Getty Pictures

Keep in mind again in 2014 when U2 gave absent an album’s worth of songs to each iTunes user in the environment? And it turned out that a big range of them didn’t want said album everywhere around their audio library — to the issue that Apple experienced to release a specific instrument to take away it? That was wholly my undesirable, U2 lead singer Bono wrote in an posting for The Guardian. 

When Bono approached Tim Cook, together with Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller about the strategy, he was satisfied with some incredulity. “Are you conversing about free of charge new music?” Prepare dinner mentioned, according to Bono. “But the whole point… is to make confident musicians get paid.”

“‘No,’ I reported, ‘I really don’t imagine we give it away absolutely free. I assume you pay out us for it and then you give it away free of charge, as a present to men and women. Would not that be fantastic?'” Bono wrote.

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“Tim Prepare dinner elevated an eyebrow. ‘You signify we spend for the album and then just distribute it?’ I claimed, ‘Yeah, like when Netflix purchases the film and offers it away to subscribers.’ Tim seemed at me as if I was outlining the alphabet to an English professor. ‘But we’re not a subscription group,'” Prepare dinner explained in the excerpt. “‘Not nonetheless,’ I stated. ‘Let ours be the initial.’ Tim was not convinced. ‘And this is just to people today who like U2?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I consider we ought to give it away to everybody. It’s their alternative whether they want to listen to it.”

It was clearly a humbling lesson for the band when they understood that quite a few people today not only did not want to hear to it, but did not want it there in the initially location.

“As a person social media wisecracker put it, ‘Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, ingesting my espresso, sporting my dressing robe, reading my paper.’ Or, considerably less kind, ‘The no cost U2 album is overpriced.’ Mea Culpa,” he wrote. “‘I consider comprehensive obligation. Not [U2 manager] Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Prepare dinner, not Eddy Cue. I’d imagined if we could just place our new music inside of achieve of people today, they could pick out to reach out towards it. Not quite.'”

Bono also recalled a happier tie-up with Apple on the iPod, which feted its 21st anniversary just yesterday. It was U2 that confident Steve Jobs to permit them be in people famous iPod silhouette advertisements for the to start with time, and also talked him into constructing the U2 version iPod in black with a red simply click wheel — marking the first time it was not white. Amusingly, they also requested Work opportunities for some Apple inventory, even a symbolic quantity — which he refused, in his typical immediate model. “‘Sorry,'” said Steve, according to Bono. “‘That’s a dealbreaker.'”

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