So there I was reading my feed of articles coming off the Mary Sue when I saw they’d put up this: “101 Things We Wish Apple Gave Us Instead of That U2 Album and How to Get Rid of It”.
And my immediate reaction was “wait, WHAT?” And I found another article on Ars Technica, here.
Because apparently not only did U2 hand their album out for free over iTunes as part of Apple’s big event this week, the album’s also now been added to everybody’s iTunes libraries.
And sorry, Apple, sorry, U2, but that’s just obnoxious. If the band wants to hand out their album for free, dandy, more power to them. Promote the hell out of it and tell everybody on iTunes ‘hey look! A free thing! Click here to get the free thing!’ And stand back and watch the downloads roll in, because sure, people like free things.
But you know what people don’t like? Editing their online data without their consent.
I just logged into my iTunes account and clicked on ‘Purchases’, and yep, there it is, right there at the top of my recent purchase list. Except I didn’t ask for the damn thing. I don’t want it. Even aside from the matter of how I’m not a fan of this particular band or of most rock in general–’cause as you all know, if your band doesn’t have a fiddle player and at least one bouzouki, I do not care–the thing that annoys me here is the editing of my account data. And giving me no way to delete it, either. It’s useless data to me. It’s taking up space in my purchase history, and okay yeah fine I can apparently ‘hide’ it, but my point is, you shouldn’t be messing with user data like that to begin with.
And okay yeah sure fine, the album does not appear to have actually shown up on my phone; I’ll need to check my computer to see if it showed up there. And I’m aware that there’s an easy answer here: “if you don’t want the album, Anna, don’t download it or listen to it”.
Thing is? If that album shows up on my computer without me having asked for it in the first place, that’s pretty much the equivalent of Apple not only standing on the street yelling FREE ALBUM GET YER FREE ALBUM HERE, but actually walking up to people and stuffing CDs into their pockets, no matter how you try to say “NO THANK YOU”.
It’s not a big problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s absolutely a petty first world problem.
But dammit, have some respect for the integrity of your user data, Apple. Don’t go stuffing things into our pockets that we didn’t actually ask you for. You wouldn’t do that if we walked into your Apple Stores in person, would you? (You’d BETTER not.) So don’t do it online either.
ETA: Okay, further investigation shows that this album does not appear to have actually invaded my iTunes library, no doubt because I do not actually have Automatic Downloads turned on. I am however hearing from friends that THEY have had it show up. tells me it startled her quite a bit because she KNEW she hadn’t purchased any U2, and for a long bit there she was afraid she’d gotten hacked somehow until she saw the news going around about the promotion.
The takeaway here: I don’t care what you’re promoting. I don’t care if it’s the finest album in the history of music. Any promotion that alarms your users and makes them think their account security might have been compromised is seriously not cool.
Comments
12 responses to “This is not encouraging me to listen to U2”
oh good, I am not the only one feeling like this
Yeah, definitely not. I am only somewhat mollified to discover that the album does not appear to have actually tried to invade my iTunes library, no doubt because I do not have Automatic Downloads turned on. Which means I can just leave it hidden in my list and ignore it. But still, I shouldn’t have to go to the trouble. Bah. 😛
it did invade my Ipod which I discovered while listening to music… was pretty confused about this and worried since I know I didn’t Purchase any U2. It got better when I saw on the news what they did but for a long moment I thought my account was hacked… NOT COOL!
Yeah, anybody who has Automatic Downloads turned on probably had it show up. _Really_ not cool.
i had automatic downloads turned on and it didn’t show up in my windows itunes. it did show up on my iphone. skimming the first few songs, it sounded like noodling – no Joshua Tree, that’s for sure.
Joel: Huh, maybe Automatic Downloads doesn’t work as well on Windows? That would somehow fail to surprise me. And yeah, other people I know who actually like U2 were telling me the album wasn’t impressing them.
I get what they were trying for, but this was a mistake. They were trying for an Oprah-style giveaway (“You get an album! And you get an album! Everyone gets an album!”) when it should’ve been put up on iTunes as a free download.
If you go to the iTunes store the album has a promo spot front and center, but unless you actually click on that, you won’t see the text that says “it’s free and we’ve put it in your library!”
I’ve also seen a distinct lack of promo mail sent around to actually TELL people that this has been done. Which is an extra layer of fail. If you’re going to go giving an album out for free to EVERYBODY in your user base, you should at least TELL THE USERBASE. There’s no guarantee people will see the promo spot on the store!
Grrrrr I dont even know how to delete from my Ipod!
Can you swipe across the tracks and have a delete button pop up?
[…] those of you who, like me, were startled to have an unwanted U2 album show up in your account library on iTunes, Apple apparently has received a lot of flak for this. Because […]