I Still Find What I Wasn't Looking For

Apple has given all iTunes users a free copy of the new U2 album, and boy are they angry. If you're confused about this, the problem is the way they did it. They could have just presented people with the option, would you like a free copy of the new U2 album: yes/no? Or they could have just dropped the price of the album to zero, giving everyone a chance to take it if they want it. But instead, they automatically placed it in everyone's libraries of owned music. That means it will always be in everyone's searches of their own music. And if - like many people - the account is set to automatically download purchased music, it downloaded to their iDevice without their knowledge.

I think there's a couple of trends at work here:

Music Distribution

Ever since the rise of MP3s in the late nineties, people have been proposing new ideas for selling music, in a desperate bid to create something that would work with the new technological reality. And these proposals have generally been terrible:

• give music away, make all your money on t-shirts,
• let people pirate music, but give fans remixes and outtakes if they pay for the music (with no explanation of why those extras won't be pirated.)
• sell music at much lower prices, and people will buy more of it (and stop pirating it)

You can imagine how this album giveaway might have been promoted to the suits as a bold new initiative for distributing music and glamorizing the Apple brand.  It would be easy to load it with buzzwords and get everyone excited. And it's apparent that neither Apple nor U2 thought this through either. Apple made a big - likely expensive - gesture for its customers, and it made them furious. U2 released an album that a lot of people liked, but the big story is how many people didn't like it.

Of course, previous schemes to reinvent the music biz required a mass movement with businesses and consumers getting on board. But in this case, it would've just required the agreement of U2, their manager, and a few Apple execs. So I fear we've entered a new era where harebrained schemes to distribute music will actually be put into practice.

Music Tastes

I’m a fan of U2, so I would have been pleased to receive a free copy of the album. But I do sympathize with the people who were upset about it. That’s because it’s so easy to imagine a reverse example where someone I didn’t appreciate was imposed on me, by a corporation that assumes everybody wants the same thing.

U2 have regularly been called the Biggest Band In The World, and through a lot of their career they have been the biggest rock band, though that says more about the splintering of music fandom and the decline of rock as the primary pop-music style. And yet, even they aren’t universally liked enough for people to be happy getting their album for free.

Arguably, they’d still be one of the best choices for pleasing the most people by giving away free music. They’re far from the most popular now, but they won’t provoke anger like some artists. For instance, more people would be happy to receive a Justin Bieber album, but more people would also be infuriated too. So this incident demonstrates just how diverse popular music has become. In fact, there is no “popular” music any more, there are just genres of varying sizes.