Moneybox

Apple Will Allow Ingrate Public to Return the Sacred Gift of U2

Busy bestowing gifts on those who will never appreciate them.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Realizing that some users might feel a little icky about the corporate crypt keepers of their personal media collections reaching a ghastly digital arm through the Internet and foisting a U2 album into 500 million iTunes libraries, Apple has backtracked slightly.

Apple posted specific instructions for removing U2’s Songs of Innocence from users’ libraries six days after gifting the album to every iTunes user and automatically downloading it from the cloud into the libraries of those who had that feature enabled. Apple went as far as to create a specific link to automatically remove the album in only four more manual steps than the process that put it there.

I’m being hyperbolic with the affront here, but it’s a creepy precedent, and over the weekend I did have to skip over U2 songs I never asked for on my phone. Also, is Apple betraying a note of petulance in its page title, which refers to an “iTunes gift album”? Come on you ingrates, we bought you a present, and this is the thanks we get? It’s almost as if people have no idea how much it costs to buy 500 million U2 albums directly from Bono. It’s almost as if… people have never heard of U2.