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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

This was an interesting marketing failure. Looking at the Twitter feed for 'u2 iphone', it was clear that a lot of people took umbrage at what they thought was an invasion of their music library, or thought they had been hacked, or otherwise felt it was a mistake.

Then the word spread that the album had been given away for free. But U2 and Apple had gone to great pains to explain that Apple "bought" the album for its users as a gift.

I feel sorry for the support people who had to field calls about this stuff this week. What a half-baked marketing stunt.

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Sounds like a pretty good deal for Interscope:

"At one point Thursday afternoon, 26 U2 titles charted simultaneously on iTunes top 200 albums rankings, Apple and Interscope Records representatives confirmed to Mashable on Friday. Meanwhile, U218 Singles landed in the top 10 in 46 countries."

http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart-apple-r...

But it's a record with a huge asterisk, like Major League Baseball records of players using steroids. If buying your own album in order to get it into the charts is legitimate, I'm a millionaire because I pay myself thousands of dollars per minute.

(some of those dollars may be the same ones over and over again)

Yeah, another way to game the system is to include your album with concert ticket sales. That counts as a sale officially, but you probably aren't losing many "real" sales since your fans probably have the album already.

Well, according to the news, Apple paid $100 million for the rights of "giving away" those copies.

You are, of course, paying income tax on your salary? :)

It makes me wonder about the mindset of the people setting these kinds of policies.

It's easy in hindsight to cast aspersions, but to me it seemed prima facie an 'invasion' of a private space. Like, Apple decided that owning a U2 album was now mandatory.

I'm reminded of that Page quote last year where he dismissed any Google Glass privacy concerns.

I don't have a good articulation for this yet, but it seems an awful lot of people are blind to the alienation these systems are capable of causing.

Don't discount this as a way of getting non-apple fanboys talking about apple. Hell, I didn't even know U2 was alive... now I am talking about them.

I am sure it wasn't the intended purpose... but there's a lot of pub on this... and it certainly doesn't seem to be affecting sales.

I think nothing short of a meteor impact could affect sales. But Apple seems to be taking some risks here with its image. It's real easy to seem uncool if you're bungling a marketing campaign and imposing a dad album on everyone, in a way they find intrusive.

And it's a bad idea to seem uncool right before you launch a very expensive line of fashion accessories. All it took was one photo of showering Scoble to forever make Google glasses radioactive.

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