U2 have a new album – and it’s all over the web. There are 14 downloads points. It’s all over BitTorrent, available for free. People are exchanging notes about how to download it for free. There’s a certain element of glee that the album, which wasn’t going to be available, has suddenly leaked out.
No, I’m not talking about the release the other week on iTunes, for free, of U2’s Songs Of Innocence. This is a rewind to February 2009, when the band’s previous album, No Line On The Horizon, leaked out on to the web nearly two weeks ahead of its official release date. The same had happened before that, with How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004: leaks, and peer-to-peer delight at getting something for nothing.
Yet to judge by the howls when Apple made the latest album free to download to all of the 800m or so iTunes account holders (by automatically adding it to their “Purchased” folder), there’s nothing the internet hates more than getting music for free. Especially if, in the case of people who have “automatically download new purchases” turned on, the music appears in their music folders. (For everyone else, it is simply sitting as a potential, but unrealised, download.)
So what’s going on, internet? Do you like getting U2 music for free, or not? Actually, and as so often, the howls came from a minority – as you can tell by the fact that all of U2’s other albums immediately shot back into the charts. But those outside the fanbase seemed to throw a collective grump. And those who get their kicks from purloining stuff that they’re expected to pay for were especially grumpy. How very dare the music industry make something available for free that it usually gets people to pay for. And what a wicked notion to get the world’s most valuable company to bear the costs of buying it (Apple is said to have kicked in $100m on this). It’s much more wicked than Samsung spending $5m on Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail last year to make it available to a million Galaxy smartphone owners … isn’t it?
Both Jay-Z and U2 got some bad reviews for reasons unrelated to the music content. Samsung’s special app for downloading the album crashed (leading a waggish commentator to observe that Jay-Z now had the round 100 problems). U2’s album has a slew of one-star reviews from frustrated would-be listeners who don’t seem to have received the album. Distributing the data to hundreds of millions of accounts turns out to be a non-trivial task.
But there’s another way to view it. “Giving away a U2 album highlights how much Apple has missed the shift in music consumption,” observed Peter Richardson of Counterpoint Research after the event. He’s pointing to the fact that streaming music has become so important to the business. It’s certainly how I tend to discover new music: I find new artists through streaming service Deezer (and previously, before the sad demise of its cheap streaming service, last.fm) and via songs I hear and identify via Shazam. By contrast, iTunes is mostly for when you’re sure you want something. It’s buying the book versus visiting the library.
We’re moving though to a time where people aren’t content with buying the book, nor visiting the library. They want to carry the library with them all the time. Hence Spotify and its mobile subscriptions. But are people happy to pay for the library? Music piracy is still an issue that the record labels grapple with – though the introduction of streaming services, notably Spotify, does seem to have reduced it to a hardcore who just won’t pay for anything, and enjoy getting stuff for free. Such as U2 albums. Hang on a minute.
Maybe the real problem is that the music industry has actually done what every internet critic kept saying it should: find a different business model. Getting Apple to pay for an album is the same process as the Coca-Cola company licensing the Ting Tings for new ads, or a TV company using a song to advertise a new series (I know a veteran guitarist whose bank account got a nice uplift via a detective series recently). Perhaps the problem isn’t with U2; it’s with some people’s expectation a few years ago that the music business would roll over and start giving everything away without strings. That was never going to happen – except in the minds of those less imaginative than record executives. Complaining about the U2 album puts you into that category. Now, are you still sure you want to complain about this?
