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by bigie35 1427 days ago
Highly likely I'm misremembering, but a decade (at least) or so, there was an iTunes promo where Itunes literally pushed a free U2 album to everyone who had an iTunes account for free.

I specifically remember the internet hate that received at the time haha.

Here's a link: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/09/the-free-u2-album...

2 comments

Yup. And the hate and negative backlash is still here - I'm not kidding, my wife can NOT hear U2 without a visceral reaction! It followed her through like 3 cars, until she finally married a guy nerdy and persistent enough :-D
That's literally what the parent comment is describing
It bears repeating. I've tried to remove that f*cking album from my library so many times, on so many devices. It's effectively unkillable; and I'm no stranger to computers.

Why that tax-dodging blowhard felt he had the right to squeeze his turd of an album onto each and every apple product I buy for, presumably, the rest of my life is unfathomable.

It's as simple as Jobs thinking people would like a free album, but they had no mechanism to "offer" an album, so they just added the entitlement to everyone's accounts. Then they had no mechanism to "remove" an entitlement, because why would anyone want to remove content that they "bought"?
Jobs died 3 years prior to this.
It’s really weird how much love Apple has for U2. That whole episode was just so cringe and tone deaf. Knowing the internal politics around it would be fascinating as surely someone tried to stop it.
I totally agree with that, I didn't like U2 back then but I know actively hate them since that episode.