I was really touched and a little broken-hearted by Bono's open, vulnerable reply to someone's complaint (on behalf of all the iTunes bellyachers) about the release strategy:
"Oops. I’m sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea — might have gotten carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a 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."
I truly feel the viciousness of the complaints about receiving an unsolicited, yes, but wholly free gift of an album in your iTunes cloud is the very repellent pinnacle of First World problems. I recognize I say that as a stalwart fan of the band, but if a free Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande album appeared in my cloud, I'd shrug, pop off some line about, "you couldn't pay me enough", and move on with my life. For those who had their account set to auto-download, they only have themselves to blame, but even the few minutes it would take to rectify their situation don't warrant the bitter vitriol they collectively spewed about the effort.
I believe there's something quite telling in U2's release strategy. In a world where Taylor Swift will close out 2014 with very possibly the only album of the year to exceed one million units sold (Ebola, may you take us all), the coffin lid has been nailed shut on album sales. The money in music is almost wholly reserved for touring now, so U2 may have been the first band to show us how music sales will occur in the future--major corporations purchasing albums on behalf of consumers for the right to distribute them to people in exchange for enduring the corporation's advertising, or purchasing its products. There's been a lot of talk
(about this next song, maybe, maybe too much talk...this song is not a rebel song, this song is...oh, sorry, guys...um, so anyway...)
about U2's release strategy devaluing music. Music's already been devalued to damn near ground zero by paying consumers; U2's move doesn't remove the money from the equation, it just shifts it to where somebody other than consumers will be paying for albums now, leaving consumers to singularly focus on putting their disposable income where there hasn't been a down shift--concert tickets.
