News - 12/09/2014

Will we ever know how many iTunes users downloaded U2’s album?

Will we ever know how many iTunes users downloaded U2’s album?


As previously reported by Rockol, U2 joined Apple CEO Tim Cook on stage at the Apple Keynote on September 9th, announcing that the band's latest album would be available for free to all iTunes Store account holders. Not only that, but the album has been virtually “shoved down their throat” as over half a billion iTunes account holders have seen it appear in their iTunes cloud collection by default.

According to the Billboard's sources U2’s album “Songs of Innocence” was downloaded 200,000 times in the United States in the 24 hours following the Apple keynote, but this figure is being disputed by Universal Music. The label stated that the numbers quoted are completely inaccurate.

If in any way accurate, this would be a decent figure but perhaps not as high as many expected given that Beyonce's surprise album actually sold 617,000 copies in the first three days of availability back in December 2013.

The truth is that it is going to be extremely difficult to judge the impact of this very unusual rollout since Apple won’t have to report the downloads actual downloads to Nielsen for charts purposes - the album was free so those downloads won’t count. In fact, it's probably not in Apple’s best interest to reveal those figures unless the numbers are truly staggering. 5 million downloads would make for a pretty powerful story, but also an unlikely one since 10% of all iTunes account holders would have to have taken the company up on the offer.

Some users have seen the automatic addition of U2’s album to their collection as an invasion of their “musical privacy”. This has prompted several articles showing users how to delete the album and the BBC’s step-by-step tutorial is currently its fourth most read news story on the BBC News website.

The backlash is likely to be short-lived though. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus preorders are live this morning and the animosity should subside as “the upgraders” eagerly await & tweet about their shiny new gadgets.

(Andrea Leonelli)

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