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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-...

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'?

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.

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.

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

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