U2 Apologizes for Free iTunes Album

Last month I got a neat little unexpected surprise – U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, for the gigantic price of free. Of course it wasn’t just me who was in on the deal. In fact, every single person with an iTunes account had the new album downloaded into their iTunes “cloud”. All they had to do was decide to download it into their iTunes library and the music was forever theirs, all for free! Now, being a fan of U2, I had no problem with this whatsoever and immediately downloaded it into my library and onto my iPhone. Others, however, found U2’s method of distributing their music to be highly offensive, annoying, and among other things, rude. (Rude, really?) I understand if you’re not a fan of theirs and didn’t want the music – you didn’t have to download it and could’ve chosen to hide it in the cloud. But to loudly complain about a band (an incredibly popular one at that) releasing their entire album to the public for free? That doesn’t seem like something to gripe about, but that’s just me. Anyway, enough people complained, and Bono has given a response via a Facebook video interview.

Bono responded to one user’s request that the band never release an album that downloaded freely to iTunes again. Here’s his response:

Oops. I’m sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea — might have got carried away with it ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we’d poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.

Maybe I’m a bit biased as a U2 fan, but it seems like there are a lot worse things to complain about than getting free (and legal, I might add) music. What do you think?

[Image via tekrevue]

SOURCE: pitchfork