For Bono and U2, Apple iTunes Partnership Finally Hits a Wrong Note | Hacker News Reader

For Bono and U2, Apple iTunes Partnership Finally Hits a Wrong Note

nytimes.com

44 pointsNaOH30 comments

This is perhaps a bit off-topic but,

>after all, the company is fresh off a hack that allowed strangers to steal, view and share nude photos of famous actresses from iCloud accounts

Why do people still parrot this line? Unless I missed some later revelation, this was barely even Apple's fault. They may have had some subpar security practices, but it's not like their system was utterly compromised like this makes it sound.

I'm not an Apple fan, but they don't deserve the ignorantly parroted line that they let celebrities phones get compromised. And I would especially expect more from the New York Times. That statement is almost libel.

It's a David Carr opinion piece. The NYT generally protects its columnists, regardless of how bizarrely out of whack their statements may be (some exceptions exist, usually involving getting the public editor Margaret Sullivan involved).

For example, have you read some of the things Joe Nocera has said about Apple (or others, for that matter)? The guy is basically a real life version of a liberal Stephen Colbert: being wrong is a sport!

First, the line is essentially accurate. Second, when you're storing so many potentially sensitive pictures, etc you have to be at the absolute top of your game with respect to keeping private things private. Not even remotely libel.

If the claims that they ignored warnings are correct, I would indeed lay most of the blame on Apple:

http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/25/researcher-...

It may be the case that celebrities chose poor passwords, but how can you blame them? Did Apple enforce strong passwords? Did it allow an excessive password retry rate? Did it fail to follow up on warnings from security researchers?

Unless the answer to each of those questions is "no", it is entirely fair to blame them.

I suppose what mostly bugs me is using the word hack. Calling something that appears to be targeted social engineering a hack seems wrong to me. I guess the definition of hacking has been rather fluid in recent years. Course that word has been redefined and misused for a very long time so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

If you can fire up the Task Manager in windows, you are considered a hacker in my circle of friends.

"It took nearly 30 years for “The Joshua Tree,” the 1987 album that was U2’s breakout ticket to megastardom, to reach 30 million people."

That's a bit disingenuous. More people than that would have heard all the major songs off of Joshua Tree on the radio and on MTV in one single market - the US - in just the first few years. U2 was everywhere from 1988 - 1995. It's very likely that college radio stations alone ended up playing the entire Joshua Tree album for 30 million people in the US over the first decade of its release.

Yeah, you can't compare actual album sales with free listens.

I liked his answer. Transcript:

Q: Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people's playlists ever again? It's really rude.

A: Uh, oops! Um, I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea. Got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania. Touch of generosity. Dash of self-promotion. And, deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into for the last couple of 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.

Right, Apple is the one who should have shown a little class and taste. I've learned not to expect that from Bono or record labels. But Apple should have realized it was a bad idea. Or at least have made it optional.

The whole relationship and Tim Cooks weird statements like "ISNT THAT THE GREATEST SINGLE YOU HAVE EVER HEARD?" at the iPhone keynote seem so out of whack with their normal advertising audience I don't know how it made it through

Artists are not usually prone to that - that's a total bullshit answer. Few out of the hundreds of artists I personally know & have interacted with are like that. Some even in the record industry itself (one has a Grammy).

Then again, it's not surprising that he'd be full of himself.

If you were fearing irrelevance in the eyes of your fans (especially after being off their radars for 5 1/2 years) and had access to a megaphone that reached half a billion potential customers, what would you do? Would the thought cross your mind at least a little?

Don't know if artists want to be heard, but see how you casually brag about knowing "hundreds of artists", including a Grammy winning one, "personally".

Bono is a hard-core businessman, not an artist.

This is a guy who raised to fame on giving fundraising concerts to help poor children in Africa, and himself donated ZERO dollars out of 1.7 billion he made on Facebook stock.

God only knows what deals has been made behind scenes U2 vs Apple.

Edit: I stand corrected: first and foremost, he's a hard-core businessman, THEN an artist.

I detest U2 in basically every way, but to say he's not an artist is quite shortsighted.

I'd be OK with criticizing his capital gains if he were dead and they didn't seem to be distributed reasonably. At least until then, it seems pretty gross to criticize him on that basis. And to call a member of such an influential band "not an artist" just seems silly.

Sorry, still clearly an artist first. Perhaps even philanthropist would be higher than "hardcore businessman".

And Bono made way less than $1.7b on Facebook. Probably well less than $100m. Possibly less than $10m.

Simple downvote.

Some math: http://fortune.com/2012/05/18/no-facebook-did-not-make-bono-...

    So, again, at best Bono gets $43 million.
    Or, in other words, just more than Britney
    Spears will make for two years of judging
    The X Factor. Let alone Paul McCartney’s
    reported $1.04 billion net worth. Clearly
    Facebook has been good to Bono, but not
    nearly as good as is being portrayed…

It would have been amazing if they released the album for free but people had to download it. By making it mandatory, they showed they were very tone deaf and ruined the promotion.

Nobody seems to talk about how much Apple paid U2 for the right to give the album away for free. I suspect that U2 may have made more money from this album than they did from the last-- and that's just in the free period. (after some amount of time it goes back up to normal price.) I bet even after it goes up to normal price it will do better due to the publicity of being free.

I don't think Apple got the album for free. :-)

All in all, I think it was a great deal. I didn't get the album pushed on me-- I went and chose to download it from iTunes-- and I think the "album as promotion for larger brand" method is kinda win-win. It's not relevancy U2 is chasing but awareness, and that's the trade they made with Apple. That plus bags of cash.

> I don't think Apple got the album for free. :-)

In other words, it wasn't exactly pro-Bono. :-)

I didn't get the album pushed on me-- I went and chose to download it from iTunes

Many people did get the album automatically downloaded, which is really what angered them, and not the fact that U2 is giving one away for free.

If a moderator thinks it's worthwhile, the article headline has changed to Chasing Relevancy at Any Cost, Even Free.

indeed

This is probably due to the bookmarklet[1] that just reads the document.title from the page you are posting. It fills in the title automatically in the posting page. It is quite convenient... but often ends up not producing the actual title that is placed on the page. I believe this is the cause for a lot of HN posts not using the article title but the html title instead. And then people complain about the wrong title. And then mods make a call.

https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

I wonder if this would have blown over more if iTunes had some sort of "hide album" feature from the get go? To achieve their distribution objective, I think it had to be automatically added to libraries vs being a free "download". Comparing to Taylor Swift's removing all her stuff from Spotify, this all seems rather minor.

I really don't get why people are this upset over this little stunt. I remember when I bought my first iPod it came with a U2 song. Winamp came with the "llama's ass" thing. Other players had their own promo songs. Now Apple has taken it to the next level and pushed a song to you rather than sold it with the device. It's a little weird, a little selfish, maybe even a little desperate, but I wouldn't characterize it as anything but at most mildly annoying. Who cares? Unless you ran out of room on your device and couldn't take that one in a million picture because of it, what does it matter? I am not defending it, just trying to figure out why anyone would give it more than 30 seconds of their time, to complain, etc.

Because if you don't want them to take a mile, you'd better watch out when they start taking an inch.

What? Sorry, still don't get it. Are you saying that using a branded Apple phone which you know they can completely control remotely is all good as long as they don't push music you don't want to it? If so, this is probably the last inch in the mile they are taking. There are lots of issues with how mobile phones operate and even specifically how Apple does them, but if we are doing the whole fight for our freedom thing, this is probably not the best place to start.

> which you know they can completely control remotely

That's the problem though -- people don't know it's remotely controlled, so they didn't expect this. When you think of it, there is very little to remove the notion that a Music app is not just a glorified mp3 player because the whole system is different.

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