- It showed up one day in your apple library
- You couldn’t delete or remove it
- The band’s stupid name stood out in any library due to it being short
- At the time you couldn’t get rid of the album. It sat there eating up memory space and the best you could do was disable the album from playing in shuffle.
- Thank you OP for reminding me about this. It took over a decade but I finally got that album out of a now empty music library on a device that sat unused in a drawer. At some point between then and now deleting the album from your library became easy. Back in the drawer it goes.
The article keeps reiterating the viewpoint that not selling art devalues it. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s such a corporate take on the situation, and completely misses the actual issue people had with this. Corporations should not be using their ability to control our personal devices. It’s a violation of trust, and that’s what people were reacting to.
And further, I think it also completely ignores what is truly devaluing art: allowing executives huge cuts of the profit. They don’t do sufficient work to justify the amount they take from the industry, but if they let bands have the money, they’d lose the control that lets them keep it.
To this very day, iOS dictation still inserts U2 instead of you two. I had to manually set a correction to get it to mostly stop
Tested it right now and it worked fine. I was able to get “you too” or “you two” depending on the context, and didn’t get “U2”.
U2 is such a groundbreaking band. They’re the first band who managed to make an album with negative value.
There’s not many places I feel safe saying this, but I’m going to go ahead and say it here. I don’t really like U2s music. There I said it. I genuinely don’t understand their massive popularity.
If they’d just made the album free for anyone to download it would have been fine, instead they forced it on everyone
“if we just made this opt-in” has become the bleakest nonsense in IT.
Be it LLMs or ads or “free” albums, tech companies just can’t accept that “make me say yes” should always be the default.
In this case it wasn’t even opt-out. Once the album was on your device it was impossible to get rid of it.
I felt the same for Steam years ago. If you got a free game or something and it was shit you couldn’t take if off your list. Granted they didn’t force the game onto you but you still should be able to remove games from your account. I know you can now but there was a time you couldn’t.
it was quite a funny hobby to gift your friends shitty games, though
My friend said he has a small monthly budget for gifting a few of his friends porn games.
Maybe not anymore, this was a while ago.
I was a kid when this happened. I didn’t mind it. Free music, I thought. Cool.
Windows came with music samples back in the days too. I would’ve appreciated U2 more
Windows 95 had the music video for Weezer’s Buddy Holly on the install disc.
I’m still surprised so many people had such a strong opinion. Though honestly it’s probably a “vocal minority” moment. I know myself and quite a few other people I talked to were “oh cool, free album”
To me, “free album” is like a person handing out free CD’s on a busy sidewalk.
This is more like my landlord going into my living room and putting a CD on my shelf.
(Now someone will tell me about how my analogy is flawed, I don’t care, that’s how analogies work. It’s not the same, it’s an analogy.)
And then your landlord forbids you to remove the CD from your shelf.
