U2 front man Bono would like you to know that he’s really sorry about that whole automatic iTunes album download thing that happened with their recent “Songs of Innocence” album.
Bono:
“Oops. Um. I’m sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves.
Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard.
There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”
The apology came during a Facebook interview where members of the band answered questions asked by fans.
“Songs of Innocence” was provided free to 500 million iTunes users as a part of Apple’s September 9 iPhone event. Following the event, Apple pushed the album out to iTunes customer accounts, which caused some devices to automatically download the songs without explicit user permission.
The Internet freaked out, prompting Apple to create a special tool to remove the free album from devices.
Despite the hullaballoo, “Songs of Innocence” has proved successful for the band, with the album receiving 26 million downloads from iTunes users. (No word on how many removed it later.) Also, more than 81 million users “experienced” songs from the album, via iTunes, iTunes Radio, and Beats Music.
