U2 & Apple working on a new music format, but did they forget iTunes LPs?

U2 & Apple working on a new music format, but did they forget iTunes LPs?


As if we hadn’t had our fill of U2 news over the past ten days, Time magazine reported yesterday that the popular Irish rock band and Apple are collaborating on a new digital music format.

The article reports Bono’s description of the format as a “an audiovisual interactive format for music” that “will bring back album artwork”.

Now, this sounds remarkably similar to what Apple tried to do with iTunes LPs, arguably the largest-scale project we’ve seen in this domain so far and one that was quietly squashed when labels realised that investing thousands of dollars to create an iTunes LP just to please Apple was not a smart business plan.

In addition the article hints that this new experience won’t be available for at least 18 months. Downloads in the US are already declining, so one would imagine that should this trend continue and perhaps even accellerate. A year and a half from now downloads will still be far from dead, but won't be in a position to be revived by the introduction of a new album experience.

Now, if Apple intended to do something special with albums on Beats Music, bringing them back but in a streaming context, that could be a powerful driver for customer engagement, but it seems like the strategy for now is still a never-ending cycle of CPR for iTunes.

Finally, one wonders if Bono’s timing is right in delivering this news and how much Apple appreciated this “announcement”. Both U2 and Apple have faced strong criticism from the public around the way in which “Songs of Innocence” was released, it may have been wise to keep quiet on further ongoing projects and focus on the album release campaign.


(Andrea Leonelli)