Remember again in 2014 when U2 gave away an album’s price of songs to each iTunes person on this planet? And it turned out that numerous them did not need stated album wherever close to their music library — to the purpose that Apple needed to launch a particular instrument to take away it? That was utterly my unhealthy, U2 lead singer Bono wrote in an article for The Guardian.
When Bono approached Tim Cook, together with Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller in regards to the concept, he was met with some incredulity. “Are you talking about free music?” Cook stated, in keeping with Bono. “But the whole 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?'” Bono wrote.
“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 organization,'” Cook stated within the excerpt. “‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Let ours be the first.’ Tim was not convinced. ‘And this is just to people who like U2?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I think we should give it away to everybody. It’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.”
It was clearly a humbling lesson for the band after they realized that many individuals not solely did not wish to take heed to it, however did not need it there within the first place.
“As one social media wisecracker put it, ‘Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.’ Or, less kind, ‘The free U2 album is overpriced.’ Mea Culpa,” he wrote. “‘I take full responsibility. Not [U2 manager] Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite.'”
Bono additionally recalled a happier tie-up with Apple on the iPod, which feted its twenty first anniversary simply yesterday. It was U2 that satisfied Steve Jobs to allow them to be in these well-known iPod silhouette adverts for the primary time, and in addition talked him into constructing the U2 version iPod in black with a crimson click on wheel — marking the primary time it wasn’t white. Amusingly, additionally they requested Jobs for some Apple inventory, even a symbolic quantity — which he refused, in his typical direct fashion. “‘Sorry,'” stated Steve, in keeping with Bono. “‘That’s a dealbreaker.'”
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