This is not encouraging me to listen to U2

[annathepiper]

So there I was reading my feed of articles coming off the Mary Sue when I saw they’d put up this: “101 Things We Wish Apple Gave Us Instead of That U2 Album and How to Get Rid of It”.

And my immediate reaction was “wait, WHAT?” And I found another article on Ars Technica, here.

Because apparently not only did U2 hand their album out for free over iTunes as part of Apple’s big event this week, the album’s also now been added to everybody’s iTunes libraries.

And sorry, Apple, sorry, U2, but that’s just obnoxious. If the band wants to hand out their album for free, dandy, more power to them. Promote the hell out of it and tell everybody on iTunes ‘hey look! A free thing! Click here to get the free thing!’ And stand back and watch the downloads roll in, because sure, people like free things.

But you know what people don’t like? Editing their online data without their consent.

I just logged into my iTunes account and clicked on ‘Purchases’, and yep, there it is, right there at the top of my recent purchase list. Except I didn’t ask for the damn thing. I don’t want it. Even aside from the matter of how I’m not a fan of this particular band or of most rock in general–’cause as you all know, if your band doesn’t have a fiddle player and at least one bouzouki, I do not care–the thing that annoys me here is the editing of my account data. And giving me no way to delete it, either. It’s useless data to me. It’s taking up space in my purchase history, and okay yeah fine I can apparently ‘hide’ it, but my point is, you shouldn’t be messing with user data like that to begin with.

And okay yeah sure fine, the album does not appear to have actually shown up on my phone; I’ll need to check my computer to see if it showed up there. And I’m aware that there’s an easy answer here: “if you don’t want the album, Anna, don’t download it or listen to it”.

Thing is? If that album shows up on my computer without me having asked for it in the first place, that’s pretty much the equivalent of Apple not only standing on the street yelling FREE ALBUM GET YER FREE ALBUM HERE, but actually walking up to people and stuffing CDs into their pockets, no matter how you try to say “NO THANK YOU”.

It’s not a big problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s absolutely a petty first world problem.

But dammit, have some respect for the integrity of your user data, Apple. Don’t go stuffing things into our pockets that we didn’t actually ask you for. You wouldn’t do that if we walked into your Apple Stores in person, would you? (You’d BETTER not.) So don’t do it online either.

ETA: Okay, further investigation shows that this album does not appear to have actually invaded my iTunes library, no doubt because I do not actually have Automatic Downloads turned on. I am however hearing from friends that THEY have had it show up. scrunchions tells me it startled her quite a bit because she KNEW she hadn’t purchased any U2, and for a long bit there she was afraid she’d gotten hacked somehow until she saw the news going around about the promotion.

The takeaway here: I don’t care what you’re promoting. I don’t care if it’s the finest album in the history of music. Any promotion that alarms your users and makes them think their account security might have been compromised is seriously not cool.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[lynnoconnacht]

That is... very much not cool! (Hi! I've been lurking around for a bit.) Thank you for the heads-up! I wouldn't have known otherwise and I'd have had quite a shock somewhere down the line.

[annathepiper]

Hello and glad to meet you!

Yeah, it rather surprises me that Apple's trying to do this big promotional thing and somehow they've managed to fail to TELL THE USERBASE.

If you go to the store in iTunes, the U2 album has a promo spot front and center, but unless you actually click on it, you won't see the description that tells you that the album is being made available to everyone. And if like me you have no damns to give about U2, you would never have had any reason to click on it.

I'd think they would have at least sent an email blast out to tell customers "hey, we're giving you a free thing!" o.O

[lynnoconnacht]

You'd think, yes. That seems like the sensible thing to do. Or creating buzz about the album before the promo began. Maybe they were banking on people discussing how awesome it is that a big name like U2 gave us (all of us) stuff for free?

I rarely check out the promos. If I hadn't seen you, a third party, talking about the album, I would probably have missed the promo entirely. And now that I know about it I'm unhappy with the way the promo was handled. My parents would probably like the album, but they use the itunes store even less. If I needed to hear about it from a third party, they don't stand a chance.

I'm just... baffled that someone thought running a promotion the way it's apparently been/being run was a good idea.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, if I try to follow the train of logic here, the best I can do is to guess that they were thinking "well, most of our userbase will be watching our presentation, and those who aren't will probably be following commentary on the social networks anyway"... but still, that isn't everybody. I didn't bother to watch their thing myself, and I only followed the live tweeting about it on the Mary Sue, the site where I learned about the promo to begin with.

But even then, all I picked up off that live tweet stream was that U2 was performing at the thing, and that their new album would be given out over iTunes. I didn't get that "given out over iTunes" would actually mean "stuffed into everybody's libraries".

Baaaaaah. I've seen U2 fans talking about it, sure, but just about all of the music I give any damns about is trad and folk. Not exactly the circles in which to give damns about current rock!

[lynnoconnacht]

I get stuck on trying to find a parallel to what Beyoncé did with her latest album.

I'll be curious to see whether the album remains in our libraries after the promo has ended if we haven't downloaded it. If it disappears that'd be an argument for the idea that they added it to our libraries to make it easier for fans to access and then the argument could be "But we don't know who from the Apple userbase is a fan/interested!" It'd still be icky and I'd still think it was a bad idea, but that would be understandable to me.

[annathepiper]

There's been a new development--Apple's actually now released a tool to let people actively take it out of their libraries. I saw a BBC article about it.

Apparently they've gotten quite a bit of flak about this!

BBC article here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540

[lynnoconnacht]

Huzzah! They have seen some form of sense!

I am so not surprised to hear they got flak for it.