Ten Years Ago, Apple & U2 Gave ‘Songs of Innocence’ to Over Half a Billion iTunes Users

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Monday, September 9 will mark ten years since Apple announced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, as well as the Apple Watch.

U2 on stage

That’s all fine and good, but the real news of the day was free music from U2:

Apple, Universal Music Group and legendary rock band U2 today announced the release of the album “Songs of Innocence,” which Apple is gifting to iTunes Store customers around the world, making it the largest album release ever with over half a billion copies distributed. The album features 11 new songs from the band and charts their earliest influences from 70s rock and punk rock to early 80s electronica and soul. The album is free for iTunes Store account holders in 119 countries and is available exclusively on iTunes for the next five weeks.

“From the very beginning U2 have always wanted our music to reach as many people as possible, the clue is in our name I suppose—so today is kind of mind-blowing to us. The most personal album we’ve written could be shared with half a billion people… by hitting send. If only songwriting was that easy,” said U2 lead singer Bono. “It’s exciting and humbling to think that people who don’t know U2 or listen to rock music for that matter might check us out. Working with Apple is always a blast. They only want to do things that haven’t been done before—that’s a thrill to be part of.”

“U2 has been an important part of Apple’s history in music and we’re thrilled to make ‘Songs of Innocence’ the largest album release ever,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We get to share our love of music today by gifting this great new album to over half a billion iTunes customers around the world.”

The 11-track album started appearing in people’s iTunes accounts and the shit hit the fan. Users flooded social media, surprised to see new music in their accounts. Some feared they had been hacked, while others were simply annoyed.

U2 in Music

A week later, Apple started walking the whole thing back, as Chris Welch reported at the time:

To put it lightly, Apple’s “gift” of a free U2 album hasn’t been warmly received by everyone. And it seems the company has heard the chorus of complaints loud and clear. As of today, Apple’s offering an easy way to permanently erase Songs of Innocence with a single click. Doing so immediately removes U2’s latest album from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchase history. Apple has even set up a support website to guide people through the process.

Note that erasing the album means it will no longer show up in your “purchases” tab. So if you want to re-download it for another listen, you’ll need to go through the regular album purchase process again. Songs of Innocence will remain free until October 13th; after that, Apple’s window of exclusivity closes and you’ll need to pay for it should you regret the decision to delete Bono’s hard work. The fact that Apple had to go this far and publish a removal tool almost puts U2’s new album on the same footing as malware or aggressive antivirus software, but at least the complaining should end.

Here’s a bit from that now-retired support article:

Learn how to remove the iTunes gift album “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes music library and purchases.

Follow these instructions to remove U2’s “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchases. Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again. The album is free to everyone until October 13, 2014, and will be available for purchase after that date.

Despite this document, the album haunted some people for years.

In 2022, Bono apologized for the entire thing. Here’s a bit from his memoir, via The Guardian:

“Free music?” asked Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, with a look of mild incredulity. “Are you talking about free music?”

Ten years had gone by since the Vertigo ads; we were in his office in Cupertino, California – Guy Oseary, our new manager, me, [Apple executives] Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller – and we’d just played the team some of our new Songs of Innocence album.

“You want to give this music away free? But the whole point of what we’re trying to do at Apple is to not give away music free. The point is to make sure musicians get paid.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?”

I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.”

Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.”

Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?”

“Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.”

See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is.

If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.

Not. Quite. True.

On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

I take full responsibility.

I hope he also took responsibility for … whatever this was:

Tim and Bono touching fingers in a way I wish I could unsee

Sponsor: MarsEdit 5 →

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MarsEdit 5 is a major upgrade to the preeminent Mac app for editing WordPress, Micro.blog, Tumblr, and many other types of blogs.

The new Microposting feature makes it “as easy to post to your own blog as it is to post to social media.” When MarsEdit 5 is running on your Mac, just press a configurable global keyboard shortcut, write out your latest thoughts, and instantly publish to your blog.

MarsEdit supports editing posts in rich or plain text, and the latest update is especially great for Markdown fans. Now when you’re writing Markdown in plain text mode, MarsEdit applies live, beautiful syntax highlighting to make it easier to focus separately on the content and style of your posts.

MarsEdit is used by top bloggers to maximize their productivity and enjoyment of blogging. It’s great for pros like John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and yours truly, while also being simple enough to remove the mystery of blogging for everyday folks who just want to share their thoughts with the world.

MarsEdit also supports for publishing to Mastodon! Now you can use the same app you use to write and publish to your main blog, to write and publish to your Mastodon microblog. Check out the announcement at this link.

One app, limitless publishing opportunities.

Download MarsEdit today, and see what all the hype is about. It’ll make you a better blogger!

AnandTech Closing →

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Ryan Smith, with some very sad news:

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

No one did in-depth technical reviews like the AnandTech crew, and it’s sad that the world doesn’t value this kind of writing the way it once did.

Paper Places #5: Writing a Successful Blog in 2024 →

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Kerry Provenzano was kind enough to have me on her podcast, and we talked a lot about blogging:

In this episode, Kerry is joined by Relay co-founder, podcaster and blogger Stephen Hackett. They delve into Stephen’s 16 years of writing at 512 Pixels and uncover the key advice writers should follow if they want to write successful blog.

It was a lot of fun to talk to Kerry about my writing. If you enjoy 512 Pixels, I think you’ll like this interview.

Relay for St. Jude 2024 →

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Since 2019, the Relay community has raised $2.98 million in support of St. Jude’s life-saving work.

TWO POINT NINE EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS, YALL!

That number staggers me.

With $3 million in sight,1 today we are launching Relay’s sixth annual fundraising campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Relay for St. Jude

In May 2009, my wife Merri and I received news that would change the trajectory of our family’s life forever. Our oldest son Josiah was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Just two years later, I wrote this:

It was one of those typical hospital sofas.

The rubbery, terrible green, squeak-when-you-move jobs. It was long enough for a couple of people to sit on, but too short for any normal sized person to lay down on. The cushions were made of some type of foam that probably should be reserved for things like dampening vibrations in car doors.

On that hospital sofa, on a Saturday morning, my family changed forever.

The doctors were all incredibly nice. The head of the pediatric neurosurgery team was a middle-aged, balding, soft-spoken man who often had to push his glasses up a bit. His team was with him. His head nurse sat down next to my wife Merri, and was playing with our son Josiah as the doctors settled in, exchanging glances. None of them opened the folders of paperwork they brought with them. No jokes were cracked; no small talk was required.

It looked like an episode of House, minus the jerk. And the cane.

I don’t remember all the words the doctor used. I’ve heard people describe “out of body experiences,” but I never really believed such things ever happened. But there I was, having one. Only the highlights were processed enough to become memories. Words like surgery, tumor and blindness floated by like fog over water. I couldn’t quite grasp onto any of them, and it all seemed … hazy.

A lot has changed since I published that in 2011. Today, Josiah is 15, and has been off treatment for over 13 years. His progress hasn’t always been easy or linear, and the echos of his chemotherapy and surgical history are still present in his life. But he’s here.

That is thanks to St. Jude. They stepped between our family and disaster, not only treating Josiah’s cancer, but caring for all of us. In our trauma, we found a community. In our sorrow, we found hope.

And what’s true for my family is true for thousands of others, from around the world. In their darkest moments, St. Jude shines with the light of a city on a hill.

That’s why Relay is so proud to partner with St. Jude. We want to take that light and help it shine brighter and further than ever before.

Over the last few years, we have been blown away by the community’s work toward that end. Thank you for your on-going support of St. Jude’s work.

Donate Today

As in previous years, you can donate directly or start your own fundraiser. All of the information needed for that — and a lot more — is all live now on the campaign home page.

  1. We have something very cool happening when hit that magic number. Stay tuned. ↩

Performa Month: Reflections on a Messy Macintosh Era

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Performa Month

When I started this project, my goal was to untangle the messiest of all Mac product lines. In my initial blog post I wrote:

At its heart, the Performa line is the fruit of badge engineering. This is often found in the car market, perhaps most famously in the Chrysler K-car platform that debuted in 1981. Over 14 years, Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth shipped a dizzying array of front-wheel drive cars, all based on the same platform. Features, options, and prices ranged between them, but under the covers, these were all the same car, more or less.

Apple did something similar with the Performa, taking Macs from other lines, tweaking their features, and selling them under the Performa lineup.

In the car world, companies do this sort of work to reach different market segments without needing to create a new product for each type of consumer. In the case of the Performa, Apple wanted to sell computers to reach new users.

Before I decided to embark on this noble work, I outlined what I thought the series should entail and was quickly overwhelmed by just how many computers I would need to write about. While not every single SKU got its time in the sun this month, I think the series met my goal of trying to explain just what the heck happened from 1992 when the first Performas rolled out to 1997, when the final machines were taken off the market.

One fundamental way that the 90s Mac line differs from today’s is in naming. Today, we all know that an iMac is an all-in-one desktop, while a MacBook Air is a thin-and-light notebook. Sure, they evolve over time, but each Mac’s product name has to do with its form factor. That was not the case with the Performa and its sibling lines. The LC, Centris, Quadra, and Power Mac lines all came in a range of enclosures over the years, and those designs were often reused as Performas.

After all, the Performa was basically a collection of remixed machines from those other lines. Apple would take a Mac off the shelf, sometimes tweak its specs, toss a pile of software in the box, and ship it off to a retailer to hopefully sell it to a parent, teacher, or other user.

In that light, it’s easy to see why Apple nerds remember the Performa line with such disdain.

I did not expect the absolute mountain of feedback that I’ve gotten this month. People have come out of the woodwork to tell me about their experiences with a Performa. From using one in a classroom, to having their parents purchase one as their first family computer, most people who actually used a Performa seem to have fond memories of their beige machines. From 30,000 feet, this line of computers may have been a mess, but down on the ground, a lot of folks’ first Mac had a Performa badge on the front.

I think Apple nerds — then and now — view the Performa as confusing and overly-complicated. Untangling the product line over the last month has felt at times like trying to unknot shoelaces that probably should just be cut and thrown away. But that said, Apple did do some things right here. Not all of that bundled software was great, but those titles made the entire package more attractive to parents and teachers. I’m sure a bunch of the software was mediocre at best, but at least a bunch of it was educational and mediocre.

That leaves me conflicted about the Performa.

On one hand, it was somewhat successful in terms of getting Macs into the homes of first-time Mac buyers. On the other hand, I think the Performa cost Apple a lot in terms of reputation and brand clarity, even at the time. There’s a reason that You Know Who killed them all off.

The next year, Apple unveiled the iMac, a single computer to go after the home and education markets. The iMac was a palate-cleanser, washing away the mountain of beige Macs Apple had been selling.

A Conversation with Jason Snell

Jason and I recently sat down to talk about all of this, and his experiences covering Apple during this timeframe. As a result, we’ve released a new episode of 20 Macs over on Relay. Jason was starting his career covering Apple in this era, and I enjoyed our conversation immensely.

Thank You

When I started out on this project, I had no idea how people would take it, but it has been a lot of fun to dive into this weird chapter of Apple history.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

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