Why did U2 give away their Songs Of Innocence album on iTunes?
15 October 2025, 16:52
One of the biggest marketing blunders of the past twenty years was the time the Irish band decided the everyone should have their new LP on their iTunes account - whether they liked it or not.
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U2 have always been something of a polarising artist for many. You either love them and their music - as many do - or you hate their tunes and find their public antics rather tiresome.
In fact, the Irish group's ubiquity throughout their career was a major turn-off for large chunks of the public, and with each new album and tour, there always seemed to be a new PR angle or stunt, be it the extravagant Zoo TV and PopMart tours of the 90s to the documentaries, TV appearances and rooftop concerts of the new millennium.
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Towards the end of 2014 U2 made a bold, brave decision to give away their thirteenth studio album, Songs Of Innocence, away for free on iTunes. They had history with Apple: in 2004, they'd put their name to a limited edition iPod, branded with the colours of their album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.
But more than just giving the new album away, U2 automatically zapped the complete Songs Of Innocence into half a billion iTunes accounts, without prior agreement from users. On 9th September 2014, if you were signed up to Apple's service, there it was in your library, over a month before the physical release hit the shops.
Apple CEO Tim Cook called this example of marketing altruism "the biggest album release of all time" and with Songs Of Innocence being the band's first new full length collection of material in over five years, the stakes were high with U2 needing to remain "relevant" in a rapidly-changing marketplace.
However, a lack of an opt-in for this free gift, a lot of non-U2 fans were rather aggrieved, with the Washington Post calling the campaign "rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail".
Pink Floyd's Nick Mason told Rolling Stone "Music has been horribly devalued by being given away... it’s funny they didn’t sense some of that." Even U2's ex-manager Paul McGuinness - the man who had masterminded the band's rise to the top - claimed it was a mistake.
"People were unhappy about having something arrive that they hadn't asked for," he told the Irish Times. "It was easy enough to delete... But I think that it should have been handled differently."
Bono gave something of an apology to one fan on 15th October that year, saying in a Facebook Q&A: "I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves".
Apple published a special page informing users how to remove the album from their devices and the frontman claimed “If you don’t want it, delete it."
In his 2022 autobiography Surrender, Bono admitted the whole thing had been an error of judgement. "I take full responsibility," he wrote. "I'd thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite."
