I’ve had a little time to listen to the new U2 Album, Songs of Innocence. My verdict: It’s a good album. It’s not great, but good.
I feel like U2 played it safe here. The themes are there and I know the potential is there, too. However, I was underwhelmed. I liked the album, I just didn’t love it. Some songs might make it to a playlist or two, but most will only come up on long road trips where the “Play All” playlist comes up.
No matter. We will see them when they come to L.A. in 2015.
Even bigger than the album’s release was how it was done. U2 partnered up with Apple, who reportedly paid U2 a cool $100m, to distribute it to all 800m plus iTunes users for free.
Sounds great, right? Free album, yay!!! But NOOOOOOO!!!!!!! The Twitter sphere was full of whiners and complainers alleging that Apple infringed on their personal digital space by pushing out the album to their purchase history. Where were all these victims when the NSA spying scandal broke? Where where / are all these voices when Facebook feels like updating their privacy settings or manipulating your feeds? Where are all these voices now that all these fake cell phone tower “interceptors” are popping up all over the place?
There was one especially egregious article that irked me on WIRED. I won’t link to it (a simple search will yield the article in question), but that article called the album worse than spam or a computer virus. Really? Worse than that? What an idiot.
I attribute these complaints and whines to first world problems. It was a free album, nothing more, nothing less. I don’t think Apple or U2 had any malicious intent in giving away a free album. You don’t like it? Don’t listen and delete it.
“But I can’t delete it! It shows up in my purchase history!” Wait till October 13, when the album goes away. Of course that wasn’t good enough for these NOW cry babies. Apple was forced to go the extra step and create a special tool that would delete the album forever.
Let me clear a few things up: I am no Apple fan. I don’t like their closed systems so I don’t use their products. I own an Android phone, run Debian GNU/Linux on my laptop and use a SanDisk Sansa ClipZip player customized with RockBox. I have an iTunes account but I don’t use it. I manage my media library with MusicBee and Banshee. I consciously make an effort to use Open Source / Free Software whenever possible.
So while I did fire up the old iTunes on my wife’s laptop to download the new album (she needs Windows for her work), I was not excited that U2 choose Apple. The only other option would have been to wait for October 13 to purchase the album at either Amazon.com or Google Play, but I didn’t want to wait.
However, to go as far as to whine and infer that there where other more iniquitous plans is a stretch. I think this Conan skit hit it on the head:
Well done, Conan! U2… maybe better next time?
