Apple releases U2 album removal tool | Hacker News Reader

Apple releases U2 album removal tool

bbc.com

146 pointsschrofer109 comments

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.

This. The whole thing could have been handled so much better so easily.

You are certainly right, in my opinion, but I think that it's even more important to note how tone-deaf this move was in light of the recent iCloud leaks (I'd argue, in fact, that all of Apple's recent press conference was similarly confused).

Nobody wants to think about the idea that Apple can do/see anything they want at any time to our music collections and phones. Even if that isn't strictly true, and even if they probably wouldn't, it's a perception that's being confirmed by recent events, and this stunt re-enforced it.

Since when was it proven that the leaks were due to iCloud vulnerabilities? There were a lot of allegations, sure, but no hard evidence. If someone guesses your GMail password and leaks your mail - was it a GMail leak?

It's not proven, but honestly, that doesn't matter. This is all about public perception. If it feels like Apple did something wrong, they might as well have, at least as far as their PR response ought to be concerned.

Not only is it not proven, it is proven false.

But, I totally agree that this U2 move was absurdly ill considered.

Apple of all companies supposedly knows the value of appearances (see, for example, their purchase of Beats). I think maybe this was a "too much Kool-aid" kind of moment, where they just forgot that not everyone sees their services like they do.

Where was it proven false? I saw them say it wasn't them, but that's not really solid proof.

If there is no evidence, and they have stated that it wasn't them, anything else is malicious innuendo.

Google recently stated that the 5 million sets of Google account credentials were not stolen directly from them and only 20% of them were valid. Is this also 'unproven'?

Speaking of 'free download':

The album was shown as purchased in the iTunes Store app but there was no way to download the files, i.e., to have the album in my own library instead of just the ability to stream it via the iTunes Store.

A well-known BitTorrent search engine let me solve the issue.

> there was no way to download the files

This statement is not true.

Depending on how your preferences are set in iTunes it may now show up in your music lists even though you 'own' it. I ran into that myself.

It'll show up in your Purchases list in the iTunes Store though. You can download it from there. At least I'm pretty sure that's how I got it. IIRC clicking the "Purchased" button actually took you there.

I turned on the 'purchased in iCloud' content to my library, found the tracks, and clicked the 'download from cloud' button that shows up next to them.

My first reaction to all this was "Cool, I'll give it a try". I found it in the iTunes store and it said 'Purchased' and... I couldn't download it. I waited 2 days before trying again to figure out how to do it.

Very odd.

You're right, it only appeared as if there was no way to download the files.

You can download it, you just have to check a preference to 'show iTunes in the Cloud purchases' or something like that in settings.

As someone who didn't mind they gave me free stuff, it was hard to find out how to actually GET it.

Very strange, start to end.

Really, having a free download in the iTunes page would be actually simpler for me. I've read in the news, was curious, tried over iTunes, I can't download. Surfing, seeing "it's complicated," gave up. U2 weren't interesting enough for me to actually make an effort.

I actually got up to "show all purchases" and immediately hated that I have to actually do this as the things I bought and discovered it was not what was advertised were visible again, just reminding me of something I'd rather forget. I wish there were just a simple possibility to "permanently delete the information that I've purchased particular tracks."

Then the special "U2 removal tool" weren't necessary too.

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.

My gut feeling is that Cook & Company wanted to be able to pull a Jobs-like move upon announcement

"The album is completely free to everyone and IN YOUR IPOD RIGHT NOW"

...especially since everything else announced was a wait (for the phone) or WAY away (like the watch).

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.

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

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.

It didn't sound sinister to me, just desperate.

In the cloud do you even have a "collection"? It's nothing as tangible as a rack of CDs or even an mp3 file, in this case it is just a UI abstraction over a set of database flags.

Even an mp3 is a UI abstraction over a set of database flags, if you consider the bits on your hard drive to be a database. The cloud provider has a collection, you have access to their collection, and your curated section of their collection is your playlist.

Google music does it all the time.

This is opt-in though isn't it? When I signed up for Google Music it asked me what types of music I'm interested in and if it should auto-add similar music to my library.

It doesn't even add them to your library, it shows them on your main page as recommendations that you can add to the library.

Didn't this help U2's album sales on iTunes? It seems like it worked out pretty well for them and for Apple.

Isn't this merely a continuation of what they started in 2004 when they released their then new album and their entire back catelog on a black and red iPod?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgohSbKMb-8

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/10/26Apple-Introduces-...

I honestly think it was accidental. It looks like a classic case of a simple executive decision that appeared so trivial as to skip a careful consideration of the implementation.

Which isn't to excuse it: it was very un-Apple-like. And it certainly wasn't the only un-Apple-like turn last week.

Care to expound on the other "un-Apple-like" moves?

Probably a reference to the plethora of technical problems with the livestream.

The UX on the Watch.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297652

It would not have been the "the biggest album launch ever" if it was just posted on iTunes - it would have been just like any other album release. They had to push it out.

I kind of thought people in the tech community were just overreacting, but I've since heard plenty of people who don't follow tech news complain that it was creepy or weird or something similar.

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.

Don't discount this as a way of getting non-apple fanboys talking about apple. Hell, I didn't even know U2 was alive... now I am talking about them.

I am sure it wasn't the intended purpose... but there's a lot of pub on this... and it certainly doesn't seem to be affecting sales.

I think nothing short of a meteor impact could affect sales. But Apple seems to be taking some risks here with its image. It's real easy to seem uncool if you're bungling a marketing campaign and imposing a dad album on everyone, in a way they find intrusive.

And it's a bad idea to seem uncool right before you launch a very expensive line of fashion accessories. All it took was one photo of showering Scoble to forever make Google glasses radioactive.

It makes me wonder about the mindset of the people setting these kinds of policies.

It's easy in hindsight to cast aspersions, but to me it seemed prima facie an 'invasion' of a private space. Like, Apple decided that owning a U2 album was now mandatory.

I'm reminded of that Page quote last year where he dismissed any Google Glass privacy concerns.

I don't have a good articulation for this yet, but it seems an awful lot of people are blind to the alienation these systems are capable of causing.

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...

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)

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.

Well, according to the news, Apple paid $100 million for the rights of "giving away" those copies.

You are, of course, paying income tax on your salary? :)

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.

I'd venture to say nothing is "hastily" done at a company Apple's size but perhaps in this case it was... also seems to present consistently on multiple iProducts with no reactive crappola.

Not sure if this was the case when you visited, but it redirects me to https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/off...

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.

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...

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.

Following your logic, I want to congratulate Microsoft for the mandatory Windows XP Service Pack 2--the most popular software download ever!

There's actually a lot of debate about that in games: best-selling games tend to be often at least in part boosted by bundling with consoles. For example, the two best-selling games of all time by some counts are Tetris and Wii Sports, but somewhere around 25% of Tetris's sales came from being bundled with the Gameboy, and >95% of Wii Sports sales were from bundling. (You can see some of that debate in the endless archives of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...).

Just discounting bundled sales doesn't seem quite right either, though. If you're measuring a game's ability to independently market itself, maybe, but if you're using it as a proxy for game popularity, # of players, cultural reach, etc., then bundled games like Super Mario Bros genuinely have a ton of players and historical importance.

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.

> (does he capitalize the "The"?)

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

According to Billboard magazine, U2's last tour took in a total revenue of USD $736,137,344 (about €569,000,000)[1].

U2 could have given the album away for free as a loss-leader for the tour. The fact that Apple paid USD $100,000,000 for the album and U2 gets all that free promotion for the next tour? They totally won on this.

[1] http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/touring/1176894/u...

It was also a VERY expensive tour to put on. Nine days to setup and tear down each stop, with hundreds of workers and dozens of track trailer trucks. Setup video: http://vimeo.com/24796838

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.

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

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

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.

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"

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.

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

I agree. I have to play whack-a-mole to keep songs out of my library that I'm no longer interested in.

This.

Content providers don't seem to understand the value of permanently discarding unwanted content. They don't grasp the scale of the typical user's music (or book, or game, or whatever) library, and the user's mental capacity for managing it. I've stopped using Starbucks' "pick of the week" precisely because I _don't_want_ most of what I download & hear from them; I've already some 500 albums that I bought & know, and don't need hundreds (or just dozens) more unwanted one-track "albums", or even full albums, cluttering up the list. I'd like to give a new album/band a chance with a free download, but not if I can't make 'em go away (be it at all, or with convoluted effort) as most I don't care to keep.

Worse, AFAIK Apple still hasn't restored/fixed the swipe-and-tap-to-delete option for music put on a device via iTunes Match. Allowing the notion of having a vast permanent collection of all my purchased audio content in the cloud (whether I wish to keep that content or not), there's no sane way to remove downloaded material from individual devices. I've several large fragments of audiobooks taking up gigabytes on my phone which I desperately want to delete, but the only way seems to wipe ALL "music" and re-download what I want (and with some pretty scary-worded warnings in the process).

Yes, content providers, there's some content I've "purchased" but no longer want. Please give me a way to remove it from my life, permanently.

Honest question: is there any compelling reason to tie the account you buy songs from to your device? It seems to me that the way the manage your music for you is more of a nuisance than anything else.

Maybe I should restate the question in more general sense. I keep my gmail logged out while I browse, I never connect my kindle to wifi, because I find all of these integration moves to be more of a nuisance than anything else. So in general hat's in it for me? what's good reason to sell all of my data to large_tech_company, as opposed to just some of it?

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.

Ok cool. so the feature does exist.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4919

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

If they were made free, they wouldn't be getting all the publicity.

It seems like big artists are now using quirky ways and partnerships to release albums in order to drum up publicity and increase reach.

Jay Z pre-released his last album with Samsung as an app. Beyonce released an album completely by surprise. Now U2 releases an album where iOS users just get it by default.

It must be a setting, it didn't automatically download for me. It just added it to my 'paid' music section, but I still had to select download.

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.

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

It appears you CAN do this from the website.

I just checked this because it seemed odd to me, and on my phone, I can go to My Library -> Songs -> 3 dot menu next to the song -> Delete.

With the web interface you can mass delete as well.

Edit: I also don't recall getting any free pop stuff, maybe it's related to having the

"Keep me up to date with news and offers from Google Play Music All Access"

option unchecked in my settings?

Thanks for the tip! It appears you have to remove them song by song. I was trying to do it per artist/album. Song by song is a huge pain in the ass. Especially when they've added literally dozens of albums to my library for free.

If you view the album where it gives you the tracklist of songs, you can delete them from there as well. Still more of a pain than deleting the whole album in one move, but easier than searching through every song in your library.

Edit since HN won't let me reply:

I see a "Remove from library" in your screenshot, which I assume does the same.(Edit 2: Didn't realize there were 2 images, so I'm wrong there) And I've never had anything appear in my library that I didn't add, so I cant really check, but you seem to be correct, since I have the same menu as I do in "Songs"

Edit again:

That looks like the menu I get when I hit the album's menu button, here's what I get when I hit the one next to the song while viewing the album:

http://imgur.com/OzkhnDn

but that isn't a Google-added one, so ymmv. (However the web interface lets you delete entire albums at once, so I'm not sure why you can't in the app.)

I don't have this option for the albums I didn't add myself. I think that may be only for albums you have added yourself. See the following link:

http://imgur.com/a/CrsKN

Go to my library->albums open one that you didn't add yourself and you will see that there is no option to remove it.

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?

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. Only thing it does is suggest albums based on my listening habits or if it's new releases by artists in my library.

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.

Wow, that's really weird to hear. Google's never done that to me.

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.

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

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

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

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?'

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'll just leave this here:

http://youtu.be/fGOrm9rzm7A

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

So, no apology?

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