When 500 million iTunes customers realized that the new U2 album, Songs of Innocence, was downloaded without their consent onto their iPhones via iTunes on Sept. 9, chaos on social media ensued. Cries about the lack of privacy and good taste erupted, causing Apple’s $100 million purchase of the album to be considered a much greater failure than a success.
CBS News called the situation a “$100 Million Debacle” since Apple paid that much as a blanket payment to Universal and U2 in order to release this album free to the public. However, only two million people actually downloaded the album willingly, according to The New York Times. That’s $50 an album, which is unrealistically expensive for an album that so many people were angry about getting, even for free. If the average cost for an album on iTunes is around $12, Apple just lost $76 million.
This push onto iTunes customers came with good intentions and reasoning; it was an attempt to begin a new music format in hopes to end piracy. “A new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music,” Bono said in TIME Magazine on Sept. 18. One issue is that U2 is outdated, and younger iPhone users were upset about the download because the music wasn’t a genre that they listened to. The band’s classic rock vibe is a stretch from today’s rap or pop, and CBS News’ advice to Apple is: “Never, never, never to let those over 40 decide what music they think younger consumers are bound to think is cool.” Downloading music without consent onto people’s phones via the cloud that they didn’t even want induced anger, partly because of the lack of space for it, and partly by unease at the reality of phone security.
Students are upset about the U2 album because it is taking up space on their phones that they didn’t have. With everyone wanting to update their phones to the iOS 8, students need all the extra space they can get. “I didn’t even know the album was there,” said said UT sophomore Jasmine Russel, “but it’s annoying that it takes up space.”
People don’t like things forced upon them, even free music, according to Forbes magazine, and they appear to like the lack of security of their phones even less. Downloading music without consent onto people’s phones via the cloud raised a lot of concerns about privacy, as well as culture, and the fact that Apple can put anything onto 500 million people’s iPhones undoubtedly leads suspicions to what hackers can get off of them. My biggest concern isn‘t the quality of the music or the fact that it was “pushed“ upon me. Free music is cool, no matter what kind of music it is; I‘m mainly worried about the misconceptions we might have all had about phone security.
The album wasn’t even officially downloaded to the iPhones, it was just put there and everyone was given the opportunity to download it if they pleased. However, because the music wasn’t officially downloaded into MP3 format, the songs eat up data every time they’re played, and six songs is about 20MB of data, according to cnet.com. For someone like myself on a 500MB data plan, that’s a huge amount, not to mention it slows the internet down. Someone listening to the U2 album that they didn’t download will have slower internet than someone that wasn’t listening to the album or someone that had already downloaded it.
The album will be removed from everyone’s phone and available to be purchased instead, unless it has already been officially downloaded from the cloud, on Oct. 14. Although the album may be gone, the issues regarding privacy, culture, and the media’s ability to push anything they want onto 500 million iTunes accounts remain.
Olivia Reeb can be reached at olivia.reeb@spartans.ut.edu