How To Get The New U2 Album Out Of iTunes

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It's pretty sad that you need special instructions to remove a free album from your phone and iTunes account.

Many were upset when the album suddenly appeared in their iTunes library, and, depending on a user's settings, sometimes downloaded itself onto mobile devices. There is a way to hide albums from view in iTunes, but if you just can't live with Songs of Innocence being tied to your account, Apple has pushed out a tool to eradicate it from your account forever.
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I don't care if it was Yanni or Lady Gaga, why bitch? It's free. Don't like it? Don't listen to it.

Last time Apple does anything nice for people...

It's a decent album. Not great, not horrible. I do like U2's older stuff. I have no hate for the band.
 
How do you screw up giving stuff away?!?!?!? Apple screwed up. If the U2 download was an "OPT-IN" situation then that would be fantastic and a nice "Thank You Apple" would apply.

but...

If somebody walked into my house and laid a $10 bill on the counter and left I'd be pissed. Sure I'd keep the $10 cause free is good, but I'd still bitch about it because my house was violated.
 
kindasmart said:
If somebody walked into my house and laid a $10 bill on the counter and left I'd be pissed. Sure I'd keep the $10 cause free is good, but I'd still bitch about it because my house was violated.
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This is more like the bank deposited $10 into your bank account. You don't have to take it out. They didn't invade your privacy. They just gave you something without breaching any of your security.
 
No, this is like the bank plastering my bedroom wall with marketing. After all, I don't have to look at it.
 
Apple's market cap is greater than $600B. Expecting them to handle basic electronic transactions with perfection is justified, in my opinion.

On the other hand, I can understand someone drawing the opposite conclusion from the same premise: Because they are so big, why should they care anymore about being perfect?
 
I noticed everytime I plug my phone into the car that U2 album would start playing. I had no clue where it came from and why I couldn't delete it. It's pretty annoying
 
At least i'm not alone in my thoughts that U2 is a terrible band and produces horrible content.
 
Ur_Mom said:
I don't care if it was Yanni or Lady Gaga, why bitch? It's free. Don't like it? Don't listen to it.

Last time Apple does anything nice for people...

It's a decent album. Not great, not horrible. I do like U2's older stuff. I have no hate for the band.
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Limited scope thinking.

My example applies to me directly -- I'm in a VERY remote part of the country and have a limited amount of (reliable) bandwidth per month on my Verizon 4G hotspot. (remote oil rig, suck here for upwards of 2 months at a time) Currently 12GB a month (I could blow through that in a day if I kept to my normal habits).

Point is -- how pissed would I be, or any other rational person to find that 5% of my monthly allocation went down the shitter for something I didn't ask for, didn't want, and didn't approve?

It's already hard enough to make 12GB last 30 days without apple forcing something down your throat you didn't ask for. Say I have a budgeted and planned monthly GB setup... Apple's little stunt pushes me over my plan and then I'm autobilled $15 by Verizon... is that album (i didn't want) really free now?

the term free doesn't mean what it used to. There is always some promotion angle, or someone else benefitting from you getting something for "free".
 
Someone said it best that free lunch is good but not when it's forced fed down your throat which has been Apple's approach.
 
Yeah they can keep that u2 garbage. Their new sound is f ing horrible and they haven't had anything good in almost 30 years.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Limited scope thinking.

My example applies to me directly -- I'm in a VERY remote part of the country and have a limited amount of (reliable) bandwidth per month on my Verizon 4G hotspot. (remote oil rig, suck here for upwards of 2 months at a time) Currently 12GB a month (I could blow through that in a day if I kept to my normal habits).

Point is -- how pissed would I be, or any other rational person to find that 5% of my monthly allocation went down the shitter for something I didn't ask for, didn't want, and didn't approve?

It's already hard enough to make 12GB last 30 days without apple forcing something down your throat you didn't ask for. Say I have a budgeted and planned monthly GB setup... Apple's little stunt pushes me over my plan and then I'm autobilled $15 by Verizon... is that album (i didn't want) really free now?

the term free doesn't mean what it used to. There is always some promotion angle, or someone else benefitting from you getting something for "free".
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5%? A CD is roughly 700 MB. A Flac version of that is 400 MB or less. A lossy version of the album is roughly 70 MB or roughly 1/2%. You're not getting a Lossless copy, so it's not even close to 5%. Besides, AFAIK, it d/l to the iCloud, not your phone. I have no idea how itunes works, because it's not installed on my machine.
 
I got it.

It's pretty bad.

But then I'm not big on studio pop and this album is the poppiest pop U2 has made to date.

I wouldn't have a tantrum about a free album. Of course I'm no fool, I have terrible internet but like any even remotely savvy idiot, I turn off auto download in.. Well.. Everything..
 
LOL! The moment U2 realizes that they are so terrible that they can't even give away their music for free.
 
I will point out that many default features and bonuses came with windows throughout the years and it was always SOOOOOO important that people uninstall them. And many apple proponents would point it out when there was any difficulty doing so. So yeah we expect apple to provide an easy way to remove ANY feature from ios or osx.
 
90% of people bitching and/or posting here don't even have an iPhone. Thanks for playing guys.
 
nilepez said:
AFAIK, it d/l to the iCloud, not your phone. I have no idea how itunes works, because it's not installed on my machine.
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Nothing downloads anywhere unless someone clicks on the songs and asks for them. This link is to remove the "album" from iTunes. That is, it removes the little cloud symbol that indicates whether you own something and it's either downloaded on the device or the little cloud symbol to click on in order to initiate the download.

It's the same thing on iTunes as on the phone and also the same as Play when someone owns something but it's not downloaded on any device. Apparently just owning the album is pissing people off and of course there's no logic, rhyme or reason as to why things get discussed the way they do here because it impacts pretty much no one frequenting these boards but there you have it.

And in other slightly related news, Google gave away an album last week but apparently I had to go and click the album and go through the process of actually "buying" it. I flagged the email but never got back to checking it until today and now the offer is expired. So that way of giving things away sucks in my opinion.
 
Grahamkracka said:
LOL! The moment U2 realizes that they are so terrible that they can't even give away their music for free.
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And yet they, along UMG got 100 million. A month from now, they'll release it with additional material (probably for a relatively low price) and a good chunk of the people who would have bought the album without the iTunes give away will buy it again. Considering they probably wouldn't have sold much more than a million copies I'd say they made wise choice. Next year, they'll go on tour and they'll hundreds of millions more.

You may not like them, but it really doesn't matter what you like. In one week, 33 million downloaded or streamed the album. As a bonus their catalog sales have spiked too.

If they'd sold 33 million copies, the band probably would have gotten 120 million. That's probably double their best sales figure. I don't know if the album is any good or not, but by every metric this was a success for them and their label.
 
I actually like U2 but that new album just flat sucks. Seriously, I hated every song.
 
xIronCrossx said:
90% of people bitching and/or posting here don't even have an iPhone. Thanks for playing guys.
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100% of you sounds butt hurt. Don't you only need to use itunes to get the free album? If so your statement is redonk.
 
nilepez said:
And yet they, along UMG got 100 million. A month from now, they'll release it with additional material (probably for a relatively low price) and a good chunk of the people who would have bought the album without the iTunes give away will buy it again. Considering they probably wouldn't have sold much more than a million copies I'd say they made wise choice. Next year, they'll go on tour and they'll hundreds of millions more.

You may not like them, but it really doesn't matter what you like. In one week, 33 million downloaded or streamed the album. As a bonus their catalog sales have spiked too.

If they'd sold 33 million copies, the band probably would have gotten 120 million. That's probably double their best sales figure. I don't know if the album is any good or not, but by every metric this was a success for them and their label.
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Fair enough, but leave it to apple to pay 100 million to a band to give away shitty music. U2 is no longer relevant.
 
wizzi01 said:
100% of you sounds butt hurt. Don't you only need to use itunes to get the free album? If so your statement is redonk.
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Huh? People are bitching about it getting pushed/downloaded on their phones, not whether it is in their iTunes library or not. I have mine set to automatically download newly purchased songs, yet it didn't download to my phone. It's in my music app, but it's not downloaded. I just found it funny that certain people here are complaining about it yet aren't even affected and instantly come up with some story of how it would waste all of their data allowance or something. I just don't get why everyone acts so narrow-minded when it comes to Apple news . It's like they shut off their brain and just spew out random crap.
 
xIronCrossx said:
I just don't get why everyone acts so narrow-minded when it comes to Apple news . It's like they shut off their brain and just spew out random crap.
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probably exciting for some people to finally be in some sort of an "in-crowd" regardless of what the crowd actually stands for or does
 
Ur_Mom said:
I don't care if it was Yanni or Lady Gaga, why bitch? It's free. Don't like it? Don't listen to it.

Last time Apple does anything nice for people...

It's a decent album. Not great, not horrible. I do like U2's older stuff. I have no hate for the band.
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I think the problem is automatically having an album you do not want in your library. Music library is often treated as a collection of music we want to hear. So when you have an album you do not want being added into your library without your consent, and with no way of removing it, of course many people would be pissed about it.

The best approach would have been to make it optional. Just like free games on Steam or Origin. They are not automatically added to everyone's account because not everyone wants them.

If Apple or any music services starts adding free songs into our account automatically, eventually our library will be clogged with unwanted stuff.
 
Ur_Mom said:
I don't care if it was Yanni or Lady Gaga, why bitch? It's free. Don't like it? Don't listen to it.

Last time Apple does anything nice for people...

It's a decent album. Not great, not horrible. I do like U2's older stuff. I have no hate for the band.
Click to expand...

When your phone has no SD in 2014 (lol) and only limited space, I can see how people would be pissed off when they don't even want it...
 
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N4CR said:
When your phone has no SD in 2014 (lol) and only limited space, I can see how people would be pissed off when they don't even want it...
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I was going off what I've heard and personally experienced. It was added to your account, but not downloaded. Some people have auto downloads enabled. I didn't. So, I had to actually click to download the songs (I downloaded it on iTunes by a search, didn't know I automatically got it for free).

If it was auto-downloaded, yea, I can see the issue. Especially with cell providers caps and limited storage space. Otherwise, it just sits there. Doesn't bug you to download or anything.

So, I guess your mileage may vary depending on how you have things set up. Could be fine or it could be shitty. I'll admit it wasn't a very good way of doing it, but I don't see the outrage, either. "Just let it be, man....".
 
This would be like Steam adding all the available "free" to play games to your game library. Just because something is free doesn't mean I want it... It's especially annoying now when Origin is offering a game for free, and I have to be reminded about it every time I go to my Games list.
 
nilepez said:
You may not like them, but it really doesn't matter what you like. In one week, 33 million downloaded or streamed the album. As a bonus their catalog sales have spiked too.

If they'd sold 33 million copies, the band probably would have gotten 120 million. That's probably double their best sales figure. I don't know if the album is any good or not, but by every metric this was a success for them and their label.
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I'm not a big fan of post-2001 U2; (d-bags didn't even play New Years Day the last time they were in town) but calling it a success purely because it was forced out to 33 million iTunes users who may or may not have played it is a specious argument. They won't know if it's a success until it gets pushed to retail channels.

A Dark Knight quote keeps floating in my head:
"If you're good at something, never do it for free."
 
Ur_Mom said:
I don't care if it was Yanni or Lady Gaga, why bitch? It's free. Don't like it? Don't listen to it.

Last time Apple does anything nice for people...

It's a decent album. Not great, not horrible. I do like U2's older stuff. I have no hate for the band.
Click to expand...


Good, some of us don't really like them, or even despise them. I really didn't appreciate being involved in some synergistic marketing ploy to bump up their claims of album sales so that one or more of those annoying asswipes in the band can run around saying how awesome and relevant they are.
 
I think that this kind of demonstrates one area where Apple is a bit on the weak side, digital security. Not that this is directly a security matter, but Apple simply wasn't thinking about the broader context here. Digital accounts are becoming sacred and the idea of someone just altering their state even for benign purposes is concerning. And in this case it's not exactly that benign as this is clearly all about marketing.

So lesson learned, even Apple trips up things here and there from time and something tells me this will be done differently in the future.
 
heatlesssun said:
I think that this kind of demonstrates one area where Apple is a bit on the weak side, digital security. Not that this is directly a security matter, but Apple simply wasn't thinking about the broader context here. Digital accounts are becoming sacred and the idea of someone just altering their state even for benign purposes is concerning. And in this case it's not exactly that benign as this is clearly all about marketing.

So lesson learned, even Apple trips up things here and there from time and something tells me this will be done differently in the future.
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What are you talking about?

You really have no idea what is going on here :D
 
mope54 said:
What are you talking about?

You really have no idea what is going on here :D
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Isn't the problem here that this album got added to everyone's iTunes accounts when the vast majority didn't want it? The issue is pretty clear, people by in large don't like their digital accounts altered without their consent, period.
 
heatlesssun said:
Isn't the problem here that this album got added to everyone's iTunes accounts when the vast majority didn't want it? The issue is pretty clear, people by in large don't like their digital accounts altered without their consent, period.
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No, the problem here is that Apple has been mentioned.
We don't actually know if the vast majority of people didn't want it, but if they don't all they have to do is not download the songs.

Nothing was added to iTunes except a marker. To put this in terms you can understand, this is equivalent to MS giving everyone free App Store applications. They wouldn't actually download to your computer, you would have to click the "Install" button to obtain them, but they would be "purchased" if you bothered to look through the store.

I am personally bothered by the fact that Microsoft, Google, and Apple all leave all my old, unwanted purchases in their stores but it isn't grounds to bellyache on the forums...except here...when it comes to Apple specifically.

Here, I took a screenshot of my phone so you can see firsthand this grievous alteration of my iTunes account...

IMG_0999.PNG
 
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