14 DAY TRIAL // The scandal should be well known by now, since it affected every iTunes account holder in the world: U2 partnered with Apple to bring iTunes users the chance to sample for free the latest album the band had created, but it soon turned into a fiasco, as users found the album in their libraries without having requested it or even download it.
To make matters worse, the album could not be removed, and it ended up as a nuisance for people who did not care for U2 and who valued more the storage space in their accounts. Apple soon realized its error and came up with a tool that would help you remove the forced free album, “Songs of Innocence.”
Soon after the scandal, Bono decided to apologize for the free album debacle
Later, in a Facebook interview, Bono went on to apologize to people who claimed they were offended and annoyed by the free album they never wanted but were stuck with.
At the time, Bono said, “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.”
But now Bono is coming back and claiming that he's not sorry anymore and that he is, in fact, very proud of his free new album, which has been criticized by some of the biggest voices in the rock music industry, including the Pink Floyd drummer who warned Bono that he was “devaluing music” with stunts like this.
Bono is now saying that the free album helped them reach millions of new fans
Billboard quotes Bono as saying that the album is “one of the proudest things for us ever,” at Dublin's Web Summit tech conference. The musician gave specific figures: “100 million people checked us out and listened to two or three tracks. And 30 million people actually listened to the whole album. So we did in three weeks with Songs of Innocence what took us 30 years with The Joshua Tree.”
The singer was also careful to add that the band had been paid for the album release, hoping to quell the rumors that they were devaluing good music and thus confusing some of the younger bands who were struggling to get by on making music.
Later statistics showed that only 5% of iTunes account holders later downloaded the album voluntarily. In numbers, that translates to 500 million customers. Later, U2 released the album in a physical format and it managed to rise to the number 6 position in the UK charts and number 9 position in the US.