If they’d just made the album free for anyone to download it would have been fine, instead they forced it on everyone
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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"if we just made this opt-in" has become the bleakest nonsense in IT.
Be it LLMs or ads or "free" albums, tech companies just can't accept that "make me say yes" should always be the default.
In this case it wasn’t even opt-out. Once the album was on your device it was impossible to get rid of it.
I felt the same for Steam years ago. If you got a free game or something and it was shit you couldn't take if off your list. Granted they didn't force the game onto you but you still should be able to remove games from your account. I know you can now but there was a time you couldn't.
it was quite a funny hobby to gift your friends shitty games, though
My friend said he has a small monthly budget for gifting a few of his friends porn games.
Maybe not anymore, this was a while ago.
You do have to accept the gift though. You can't just force a game onto someone.
Boring :(
Bad Rats!
But then line wouldn’t go up so obviously that’s wrong
- It showed up one day in your apple library
- You couldn't delete or remove it
- The band's stupid name stood out in any library due to it being short
- At the time you couldn't get rid of the album. It sat there eating up memory space and the best you could do was disable the album from playing in shuffle.
- Thank you OP for reminding me about this. It took over a decade but I finally got that album out of a now empty music library on a device that sat unused in a drawer. At some point between then and now deleting the album from your library became easy. Back in the drawer it goes.
I was there and I went from not knowing anything about U2 to absolutely hating it all.
Until I expanded my music tastes, I only had rap and hip-hop in my playlist. And suddenly this Bono guy just shows up? 🤬
I was there
I was an applecare employee at that time, just imagine..
Do tell. It deserves a post of its own.
The article keeps reiterating the viewpoint that not selling art devalues it. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's such a corporate take on the situation, and completely misses the actual issue people had with this. Corporations should not be using their ability to control our personal devices. It's a violation of trust, and that's what people were reacting to.
And further, I think it also completely ignores what is truly devaluing art: allowing executives huge cuts of the profit. They don't do sufficient work to justify the amount they take from the industry, but if they let bands have the money, they'd lose the control that lets them keep it.
U2 also devalued their art by deciding to make what was undoubtedly their worst album up to that point. I'm a U2 fan and I was annoyed by the album being in my library.
Is this the one where Bono inexplicably counts "1, 2, 3, 14!" In Spanish at the start of a song? Lol fucking stupid.
Yeah, I would agree the loss of agency was also a meaningful impact. That's also pretty visible in Apple's products today—I only ever use the Music app on my iPhone for music I own and synchronize, but it will still give me occasional popups about signing up for the Music subscription.
There are stories about people having specific versions of a song, or even making original music that they stored on Apple devices, and those devices automagically "identified" them, removed them unprompted and replaced them with something else from the cloud.
Personally that's why I don't trust services that advertise "just working" and doing everything for you. I want control over what I use.
To this very day, iOS dictation still inserts U2 instead of you two. I had to manually set a correction to get it to mostly stop
Tested it right now and it worked fine. I was able to get “you too” or “you two” depending on the context, and didn’t get “U2”.
There's not many places I feel safe saying this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it here. I don't really like U2s music. There I said it. I genuinely don't understand their massive popularity.
M8. That's the spiciest take I've seen since someone on here yesterday admitted that they preferred Judge Dredd (1995) to Dredd (2012).
People fucking obsess over them. I really don’t get it. Not only is the music boring and bland, but they’re so fucking smug. I’m not allowed to express this anywhere.
I was a big fan growing up. Really liked Achtung Baby and of course Joshua Tree is a great album. I even liked Zooropa and Pop. Went to see them live in the 2000s but by then the shine was wearing off; I was getting older and being a fan of things wasn’t as important to my identity anymore. But I was curious recently, so I looked up when their partnership with Apple started… Yeah, it was exactly the time I stopped liking them as much. It was both validating and depressing to make that connection. I’d always nodded along when people talked about bands selling out, but U2 was my band and they weren’t supposed to do that! Now I feel like they’re the poster child of selling out.
Same here. Bono has an annoying voice and their music is bland. I guess they have fans though, but forcing people to acknowledge their existence was a stupid move from Apple.
Bold of you to say that.
U2
I think Joshua tree is alright but all the other tapes I have of theirs sits in a bin ready to get used for testing crappy decks
I only "liked" it because it was so popular I was afraid I'll be an outcast if I didn't. I have a theory, that everyone is like that.
Right? Not even mentioning that bono can't fucking count.
Though, that is one of my favorite ways to annoy my wife.
U2 is such a groundbreaking band. They’re the first band who managed to make an album with negative value.
I was a kid when this happened. I didn't mind it. Free music, I thought. Cool.
Windows came with music samples back in the days too. I would've appreciated U2 more
Windows 95 had the music video for Weezer's Buddy Holly on the install disc.
CorpoRock 'n Roll at it's finest. Let's get one of those red credit cards as well! Thanks Bone-O!
It didn’t help Songs of Innocence was one of their worst albums.
It's alright, it's alright, alright.
Apple moves in mysterious ways.
I’m still surprised so many people had such a strong opinion. Though honestly it’s probably a “vocal minority” moment. I know myself and quite a few other people I talked to were “oh cool, free album”
To me, "free album" is like a person handing out free CD's on a busy sidewalk.
This is more like my landlord going into my living room and putting a CD on my shelf.
(Now someone will tell me about how my analogy is flawed, I don't care, that's how analogies work. It's not the same, it's an analogy.)
And then your landlord forbids you to remove the CD from your shelf.
Politics fans were miffed because at the time Bono was bitching about how the Irish Government wasn’t spending enough on foreign aid, while the band had just bought a skyscraper in Dublin and had offshored their business affairs so they no longer paid tax in Ireland. They’re the PETA of gobby musicians.
They’re also aggressively mediocre, so most music fans would find no value in the album. There was a reason the band took the payoff.
Tech fans were outraged because the album turned up on every iTunes-connected device without consent, and there was no way to remove it until the avalanche of complaints led Apple to make an update specifically to allow this.
Would've been cool if it was a Ween album.
The reaction would be so polarized
Songs they wrote and performed while high on so many drugs, listening to them gets you high as well. 😃
Then one day Lyft (US ride sharing app) rolled out Lyft Bieber and I uninstalled immediately
...Lyft Bieber?
Some bullshit Justin Bieber promotion