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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.

The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.

This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.

This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.

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This damn U2 album still appears in my smart playlists in Apple Music from time to time - it is insane that I can’t delete it completely so many years later.

Apparently they removed the removal tool in 2018, you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.

> you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.

I just checked, and I can delete it from my library the same way I can delete any other album.

Thanks for the tip! I’d given up on deleting this crap. Glad to see it works now, good riddance!

It was only able to be removed after the backlash. Apple had to build a tool for it, and users had to be connected to tech media enough to know that existed. And if they didn’t do it already, it’s too late.

That doesn’t sound easily removed to me.

The U2 episode is a perfect example of something that went unnoticed by people who already used iTunes heavily, but became a major pain point for anyone who didn’t already have a large library on their phone.

If your iTunes was filled with songs, it got lost in the noise. This probably describes all of the Apple employees who thought it was a good idea.

If your iTunes was empty, U2 became that annoying song that played by default when you connected your phone to your car for any reason or other systems that played music by default. For years I can remember this happening to people in random situations and then everyone around would groan.

Completely disagree, for many people it was the only track in iTunes. And when things triggered iTunes to play it played that.

I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.

A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.

I’ve met so many people who only have that one album on their devices, and it plays every time they plug into their car or connect via Bluetooth. And they are all just annoyed/accepting of it. My wife was one of them. And what made it worse was you couldn’t just pause it: with her car’s particular head unit, anything you touched (like the volume control) would cause the head unit to issue another “play music” command to restart it. Eventually enough was enough and I figured out how to remove the album for good.

If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library. The only way to prevent this is to completely wipe out the entire library.

And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.

> If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library.

No, in this case the play command was coming from the attached device. Apple’s product was complying with the command in the only way it could, by playing the songs in the library.

Of course it's not the only way to comply. The more sensible default is to continue playing whatever's in your queue. So if you had nothing there, noting would play.

That’s right. Various connected devices are over-eager to assume the user wants to play media, and command the phone into do so unexpectedly. This is fine if there is no media to play, but then all of a sudden, thanks to Apple’s decision, there was unwanted media to play, and this album would be the one always playing.

So the album didn’t cause the problem but it revealed it.

If I'm reading correctly, the bug is in the car's audio control system.

Most cars work this way so phone makers should design around that.

Both are annoying as hell, but people found a workaround, and that album screws it again.

But yes, it's still the insult on top of the injury.

Because the presence of that album is what creates this bug and the user never purchased or downloaded it themself.

I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.

If it annoyed them that much they’d have rung apple support and gotten it removed. I agree it’s bad and they shouldn’t have done it, but after a decade you have to accept some personal responsibility for it, if I bought a shoe and a rock was inside from factory and my foot hurt for 10 years at some point some of your current suffering is your own fault for not removing it lol

My partners young niece dislikes U2 and apple for that move. She said a lot of her friend are the same. It was a bad move. They should have just made the album free and not pushed it to every device.

Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..

He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.

I use Spotify in the car, and have for years. A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of saying, "Hey, Siri, play liked songs."

"OK, playing Apple Music."

Oh, well, yet another spark of genius from the tire fire that is Siri. Whatever. I switched back to Spotify manually and went on with my day.

Since then, every time I get in the car it starts playing tracks on Apple Music. No matter how many times I relaunch Spotify, even after force-closing the Apple Music app on the phone itself, Apple Music keeps coming back.

If there is a way to get it to properly resume the playback state at shutdown time, I'm not smart enough to find it. 100% pure unadulterated enshittification... courtesy of Apple, the company with "taste."

> Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.

Lol I had completely forgotten about that, thanks for reminding me. Going to have to find a copy with that lovely MPEG blocky quality.

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