I'm not here to tell you what music you should be listening to, but I can tell you I haven't really liked an album that U2 has put out since 1991's Achtung Baby. That's why I wasn't really excited when Tim Cook and Bono told me I could download the band's new album, Songs of Innocence, for free on iTunes as part of Apple's big product event yesterday. Thanks but no thanks, fellas.
I forgot that the album release even happened within an hour of leaving the Flint Center yesterday, which is why I was surprised to see it show up in my iTunes library all by itself today. I had assumed the album would be something you'd need to opt into, but apparently in its quest to be part of the "biggest album release in history," Apple went ahead and attached it to iTunes accounts by default. It has begun to show up in iTunes libraries automatically, and if you have automatic music downloads enabled on your iPhone, it may have even downloaded without you realizing it.
People don't tend to like it when their digital media libraries are altered without their consent. Just look at the time when Disney pulled purchased movies from customers' libraries this past holiday season, or the time Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles. This U2 thing, while adding to your media library rather than subtracting from it, has already caused a minor rash of Twitter complaints nonetheless (just search "iPhone U2").
If you don't really want U2 to come up next time you put your phone on shuffle, there's no way to permanently detach the album from your account, but there are ways to hide it so that you never have to lay ears on it.
On your computer, it's as simple as pulling the album up in Album view, right-clicking it, and hitting "delete." Click through the prompt asking whether you want to hide it, and viola! It's gone!
It's a little more difficult to do the same in iOS, and it may require disabling otherwise desirable features. In the Settings app, you can go to Music and toggle off "show all music" to hide anything attached to your iTunes account that you haven't actually downloaded to your device, though that may not actually remove the songs from your shuffle rotation. In the iTunes & App Store settings menu, toggle off automatic music downloads to keep things like this from downloading automatically to your iPhone or iPad in the future. Of course, this isn't very helpful if you still want stuff you actually intended to purchase to download to all of your devices automatically.
You may be able to contact Apple to have the album removed from your account, but there doesn't appear to be an automated way to do it—it doesn't show up as a "purchase" in your purchase history and as such cannot be "returned." We've reached out to Apple to get a comment on this and will update if we get a response.
In the meantime, your only recourse is to develop a deep and abiding love for U2's Songs of Innocence, now available for free in iTunes. Whether you like it or not.
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