U2's iTunes Stunt Actually Worked

After all the hubbub over the iTunes/U2 album giveaway at the end of last summer has died down, it looks like the promotion actually worked after all.

Research company Kantar found that 24% of all iOS music listeners in the US listened to the band's Songs of Innocence album within 5 months of its release.

In fact, Kantor found that even as recently as January, more than twice the number of people listened to U2 than the current hottest artist on the planet, Taylor Swift.

T he study found that nearly every iOS owner who listened to U2 in that time period listened to at least one song from Songs of Innocence.

A lot of skeptics have since blasted the study as being biased towards English speakers or towards U2, but the fact remains that at the end of the day the giveaway did its job to get the album in front of a very large audience, and much of that audience actually listened. That's all an artist can ask from any promotion.

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The 10 Biggest Bombshells In Music In 2014

We’re almost to the end of the year and it’s always instructive to take a look back at the biggest stories that occurred in the music business. The ones that happened in the first two quarters seem so far away now, but that doesn’t mean they were any less important to the overall evolution of the business. I’m going to provide an arbitrary ranking of the top 10 stories from most to least important, but the order can easily change depending upon your outlook or station in the industry, or the current news that’s trending today. Here we go:

1. Apple purchases Beats Electronics and Beats Music. As I said at the time, I think this was more about acquiring the talent (meaning Jimmy Iovine and Ian Rogers) than the company, infrastructure or products, but time will tell. Not much has happened since the purchase in May, but look to 2015 to see how both Beats Electronics and Beats Music are implemented into the Apple ecosystem.

2. Streaming is way up and downloads are way down. Although there’s still a pretty healthy business in CDs and downloads in terms of total revenue, it’s dropping off rapidly as streaming has finally breached the threshold of consciousness for most music consumers. Look for this trend to continue to gather steam in 2015, with the next big battle being between streaming platforms rather than the different delivery systems.

3. YouTube’s Music Key service is finally announced. Rumored for more than a year, Google’s Music Key subscription service was announced and launched as a closely held beta in November. With no ads, offline listening, and access to the entire Google Play catalog, the platform has the makings of a formidable competitor to iTunes, Spotify and every other streaming service. 2015 will tell the tale.

4. Taylor Swift pulls her music catalog from Spotify. This story would rank a lot lower except for the public uproar, as it’s really more of a money grab than a philosophical stand. Swift claimed that she was standing up against the low royalty rate that Spotify was paying, yet her music remained on other streaming services, which contradicted the argument. The real reason for the hubbub is that her record company (of which she owns a piece) is angling to get acquired, so selling more CDs would help the bottom line a lot more than additional streams. The controversy and the fact that many fans were driven to buy the CD because they couldn't access the songs on Spotify took care of that.

5. U2’s free iTunes album giveaway backfires. Both Apple and U2 proved to be both short-sighted and out of touch when a copy of their latest Songs Of Innocence album showed up in every iTunes account. The problem was that everyone under the age of 30 felt that they were spammed. Hopefully the lesson was learned that music is only valuable when it's wanted. Read more on Forbes.

Analyzing Apple’s U2 Mistake

By now everyone is familiar with the blowback received from the ill-fated U2 album giveaway on iTunes. Apple and the band thought that giving a free album to all iTunes users would be heralded as a huge win, only to find that many of them objected to the album being forced on them, even when it’s by a legendary superstar group like U2. Let’s analyze what’s going on here.

1. People want pull, not push. By and large users of any platform hate to have info pushed to them. Yes, there are exceptions like email and text notifications, but by and large, we hate being shouted at, even if it’s being done electronically. A better strategy in this situation might have been to say, “Here’s the new U2 album. Take it if you want it.” While that wouldn’t have amounted to the same ability to say that it was the biggest album release of all time, it would have alleviated the feeling that people were getting an unwanted musical virus planted on their phone or computer.

2. Downloads are over. When the entire world (except Japan, which is still stuck in the CD world thanks to oppressive laws) is turning to streaming music wholeheartedly, why would Apple hold on to this vestige of the past by thinking that anyone wanted to download an album’s worth of files? Oh, that’s right, the company has this vested interest in downloads by virtue of the fact that the music side of iTunes is still a huge business that features a billion downloads a year. The fact of the matter though is that the company and band could have looked a lot hipper by providing a free 90 day Beats Music account that included a proprietary playlist of the album along, and used the iTunes downloads as a secondary offering.

3. The band isn’t as cool anymore. Let’s face it, they’re all in their 50s, and while they’ve done an admirable job staying relevant far beyond the life span of most artists, to a great number of younger people it’s just, “Who is U2 and why are they sending me their spam music files?” The fact that the song that’s featured in the ad (“The Miracle of Joey Ramone”) is about another dinosaur rocker (although well-deserving) doesn’t help the cause either. Read more on Forbes.

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