The veteran Irish rock band U2 performed last week at iPhone’s unveiling event. It was one of the highlights of the night in addition to Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO announcing the arrival of iPhone 6 and a wearable gadget Apple Watch. It was also announced that U2’s new album ‘Song of Innocence’ was directly transferred to the accounts of all iTunes users all around the globe.
Something that should have been a pleasant surprise didn’t sit too well with the iTunes users as they claimed about the huge space that the album took. The fact that the album could not be deleted added to their frustration. Many users used the social media to express their disinterest in the band’s album and made posts about how to get rid of it. Soon after the announcement Apple’s social media pages and query pages were flooded with such requests. Other users passed radical comments saying that once again Apple had invaded their privacy.
Soon after the chaos, Apple Inc. responded to these requests and came out with an instant one click removal tool that allowed the users to remove the U2 album from the iTunes account. Apple however did state that the album could be downloaded again without any charges.
U2 has been collaborating with Apple Inc. for many years now and chose the September 9th event as a platform to launch its new album. U2’s performance was more of an opening act that was followed by the much anticipated launch of Apple’s latest devices.
Unfortunately for U2, public didn’t express much enthusiasm at getting the albums free of any cost directly into their iTune accounts. This must have been a rather shocking reality for the legendary U2 who are not used to such response; especially when their new album was coming out after almost 5 years. Maybe U2 just like iPhone waited too long.
Both the parties can’t really be blamed here: Who doesn’t like U2? But then again the iTunes space storage is precious too. And the shock of seeing your accounts accessed by someone else can never lead to good reactions. This wasn’t a good move considering the number of hacking incidents in the recent past.
In Apple’s defense the company tried to do something nice for its users by giving them exclusive access to U2’s latest album before its formal release. Once the album comes out officially, it’s bound to cost you some dough; people might change their minds about the free access then.
The ideal solution to this problem would have been an official announcement that the album would be available for free downloads to iTunes users only. Moreover Apple should have offered a delete option to begin with. This would have saved both Apple and U2 some embarrassment.
It seems that Apple has been taking criticism for almost everything it has done in the recent past. The Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iCloud hacking raised some serious concerns; iPhone 6 and the watch did not receive 5 stars from many critics and consumers; iOS8 somehow got lost in all the fuss over iPhone. Despite all these issues, iPhone sales promise to look good; however nothing concrete can be said about the watch yet.
