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Analyzing Apple's U2 Mistake

This article is more than 9 years old.

By now everyone is familiar with the blowback received from the ill-fated U2 album giveaway on iTunes. Apple and the band thought that giving a free album to all iTunes users would be heralded as a huge win, only to find that many of them objected to the album being forced on them, even when it’s by a legendary superstar group like U2. Let’s analyze what’s going on here.

1. People want pull, not push. By and large users of any platform hate to have info pushed to them. Yes, there are exceptions like email and text notifications, but by and large, we hate being shouted at, even if it’s being done electronically. A better strategy in this situation might have been to say, “Here’s the new U2 album. Take it if you want it.” While that wouldn’t have amounted to the same ability to say that it was the biggest album release of all time, it would have alleviated the feeling that people were getting an unwanted musical virus planted on their phone or computer.

2. Downloads are over. When the entire world (except Japan, which is still stuck in the CD world thanks to oppressive laws) is turning to streaming music wholeheartedly, why would Apple hold on to this vestige of the past by thinking that anyone wanted to download an album’s worth of files? Oh, that’s right, the company has this vested interest in downloads by virtue of the fact that the music side of iTunes is still a huge business that features a billion downloads a year. The fact of the matter though is that the company and band could have looked a lot hipper by providing a free 90 day Beats Music account that included a proprietary playlist of the album along, and used the iTunes download as a secondary offering.

U2 in concert (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

3. The band isn’t as cool anymore. Let’s face it, they’re all in their 50s, and while they’ve done an admirable job staying relevant far beyond the life span of most artists, to a great number of younger people it’s just, “Who is U2 and why are they sending me their spam music files?” The fact that the song that’s featured in the ad (“The Miracle of Joey Ramone”) is about another dinosaur rocker (although well-deserving) doesn’t help the cause either.

That being said, you have to wonder if Apple was actually trying to specifically target U2’s prime demographic instead of trying to skew younger. The thought could have been that the initial adoption rate of the iPhone 6 would be higher and more impressive aiming by for the oldsters first. Time will tell how the data set falls on that one.

But How About U2?

For U2, the motivation here appears to be all money. There’s been no mention anywhere of exactly how much Apple paid the band for the album, but it was most likely far more than they could ever have expected had they released it conventionally.

In fact, this album release appeared to be a last minute decision since there have been reports for some time that the band had postponed its release until 2015 and had pushed the tour schedule back to coincide. With no current tour, U2 can’t capitalize on either the album or the current hype surrounding it.

Being part of a $100 million ad campaign is always nice though, but again, to what end? It’s not about brand building since their brand is well-established, and they’re not promoting anything at the moment, so it must have been a good chunk of change that Apple slid into the band’s coffers.

So it looked like both parties were off the mark here, although in a couple of weeks we’ll all have forgotten about it and moved on to other things. The 2014 Apple/U2 synergy will be chalked up as a misfire, and neither party (especially Apple) will suffer any lasting effect, although hopefully a few lessons will have been learned from it all. The biggest one - Apple superstar events just aren’t what they used to be.

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