
For Bono and U2, Apple iTunes Partnership Finally Hits a Wrong Note - NaOH
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/business/media/for-bono-and-u2-apple-itunes-partnership-finally-hits-a-wrong-note.html
======
gph
This is perhaps a bit off-topic but,

>after all, the company is fresh off a hack that allowed strangers to steal,
view and share nude photos of famous actresses from iCloud accounts

Why do people still parrot this line? Unless I missed some later revelation,
this was barely even Apple's fault. They may have had some subpar security
practices, but it's not like their system was utterly compromised like this
makes it sound.

I'm not an Apple fan, but they don't deserve the ignorantly parroted line that
they let celebrities phones get compromised. And I would especially expect
more from the New York Times. That statement is almost libel.

~~~
akamaka
If the claims that they ignored warnings are correct, I would indeed lay most
of the blame on Apple:

[http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/25/researcher-...](http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/25/researcher-
accuses-apple-of-ignoring-icloud-brute-force-attack-for-6-months)

It may be the case that celebrities chose poor passwords, but how can you
blame them? Did Apple enforce strong passwords? Did it allow an excessive
password retry rate? Did it fail to follow up on warnings from security
researchers?

Unless the answer to each of those questions is "no", it is entirely fair to
blame them.

~~~
gph
I suppose what mostly bugs me is using the word hack. Calling something that
appears to be targeted social engineering a hack seems wrong to me. I guess
the definition of hacking has been rather fluid in recent years. Course that
word has been redefined and misused for a very long time so I guess I
shouldn't be surprised.

~~~
transpy
If you can fire up the Task Manager in windows, you are considered a hacker in
my circle of friends.

------
adventured
"It took nearly 30 years for “The Joshua Tree,” the 1987 album that was U2’s
breakout ticket to megastardom, to reach 30 million people."

That's a bit disingenuous. More people than that would have heard all the
major songs off of Joshua Tree on the radio and on MTV in one single market -
the US - in just the first few years. U2 was everywhere from 1988 - 1995. It's
very likely that college radio stations alone ended up playing the entire
Joshua Tree album for 30 million people in the US over the first decade of its
release.

~~~
PsychoPenguin
Yeah, you can't compare actual album sales with free listens.

------
EarthLaunch
I liked his answer. Transcript:

Q: Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically
downloads to people's playlists ever again? It's really rude.

A: Uh, oops! Um, I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea. Got carried
away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of
megalomania. Touch of generosity. Dash of self-promotion. And, deep fear that
these songs that we poured our life into for the last couple of years mightn't
be heard. There's a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy
ourselves to get through it.

~~~
joering2
Bono is a hard-core businessman, not an artist.

This is a guy who raised to fame on giving fundraising concerts to help poor
children in Africa, and himself donated ZERO dollars out of 1.7 billion he
made on Facebook stock.

God only knows what deals has been made behind scenes U2 vs Apple.

Edit: I stand corrected: first and foremost, he's a hard-core businessman,
THEN an artist.

~~~
pbreit
Sorry, still clearly an artist first. Perhaps even philanthropist would be
higher than "hardcore businessman".

And Bono made way less than $1.7b on Facebook. Probably well less than $100m.
Possibly less than $10m.

Simple downvote.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Some math: [http://fortune.com/2012/05/18/no-facebook-did-not-make-
bono-...](http://fortune.com/2012/05/18/no-facebook-did-not-make-bono-worlds-
richest-musician/)

    
    
        So, again, at best Bono gets $43 million.
        Or, in other words, just more than Britney
        Spears will make for two years of judging
        The X Factor. Let alone Paul McCartney’s
        reported $1.04 billion net worth. Clearly
        Facebook has been good to Bono, but not
        nearly as good as is being portrayed…

------
logicalman
It would have been amazing if they released the album for free but people had
to download it. By making it mandatory, they showed they were very tone deaf
and ruined the promotion.

------
MCRed
Nobody seems to talk about how much Apple paid U2 for the right to give the
album away for free. I suspect that U2 may have made more money from this
album than they did from the last-- and that's just in the free period. (after
some amount of time it goes back up to normal price.) I bet even after it goes
up to normal price it will do better due to the publicity of being free.

I don't think Apple got the album for free. :-)

All in all, I think it was a great deal. I didn't get the album pushed on me--
I went and chose to download it from iTunes-- and I think the "album as
promotion for larger brand" method is kinda win-win. It's not relevancy U2 is
chasing but awareness, and that's the trade they made with Apple. That plus
bags of cash.

~~~
userbinator
> I don't think Apple got the album for free. :-)

In other words, it wasn't exactly pro-Bono. :-)

 _I didn 't get the album pushed on me-- I went and chose to download it from
iTunes_

Many people did get the album automatically downloaded, which is really what
angered them, and not the fact that U2 is giving one away for free.

------
NaOH
If a moderator thinks it's worthwhile, the article headline has changed to
Chasing Relevancy at Any Cost, Even Free.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
This is probably due to the bookmarklet[1] that just reads the document.title
from the page you are posting. It fills in the title automatically in the
posting page. It is quite convenient... but often ends up not producing the
actual title that is placed on the page. I believe this is the cause for a lot
of HN posts not using the article title but the html title instead. And then
people complain about the wrong title. And then mods make a call.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html)

------
pbreit
I wonder if this would have blown over more if iTunes had some sort of "hide
album" feature from the get go? To achieve their distribution objective, I
think it had to be automatically added to libraries vs being a free
"download". Comparing to Taylor Swift's removing all her stuff from Spotify,
this all seems rather minor.

------
IgorPartola
I really don't get why people are this upset over this little stunt. I
remember when I bought my first iPod it came with a U2 song. Winamp came with
the "llama's ass" thing. Other players had their own promo songs. Now Apple
has taken it to the next level and pushed a song to you rather than sold it
with the device. It's a little weird, a little selfish, maybe even a little
desperate, but I wouldn't characterize it as anything but at most mildly
annoying. Who cares? Unless you ran out of room on your device and couldn't
take that one in a million picture because of it, what does it matter? I am
not defending it, just trying to figure out why anyone would give it more than
30 seconds of their time, to complain, etc.

~~~
gwillen
Because if you don't want them to take a mile, you'd better watch out when
they start taking an inch.

~~~
IgorPartola
What? Sorry, still don't get it. Are you saying that using a branded Apple
phone which you know they can completely control remotely is all good as long
as they don't push music you don't want to it? If so, this is probably the
last inch in the mile they are taking. There are lots of issues with how
mobile phones operate and even specifically how Apple does them, but if we are
doing the whole fight for our freedom thing, this is probably not the best
place to start.

~~~
rakoo
> which you know they can completely control remotely

That's the problem though -- people don't know it's remotely controlled, so
they didn't expect this. When you think of it, there is very little to remove
the notion that a Music app is not just a glorified mp3 player because the
whole system is different.

