So it's been five days now and I still can't fully shake the U2 album off my computer.
You know the one. Tuesday's big Apple event was supposed to be about the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus, that watch thing, Apple Pay, all of it, and yeah, that's what everyone's still talking about. Preorders opened Friday morning and apparently the online store buckled for a while under the traffic, which, sure, that happens every year. But the thing that actually annoyed me personally wasn't any of the marquee announcements. It was Bono showing up near the end to tell 500 million iTunes accounts that they now owned a copy of Songs of Innocence whether they'd asked for it or not.
I want to be clear I don't even dislike U2. I had a Joshua Tree phase in college like everyone else with a burned CD collection. That's not the issue. The issue is I opened iTunes Tuesday night to do something completely unrelated (I think I was trying to find a podcast episode) and there it was, sitting in my Purchased list like it had always been there, thirteen tracks I never clicked buy on, never clicked download on, never agreed to anything about. It just appeared. And because of how iCloud syncing works it showed up on my phone too, in Music, mixed in with stuff I actually chose.
Apparently this is intentional and not a bug. Apple and U2 apparently spent a chunk of money to do this as some kind of grand gesture, get the album directly onto more devices than any release in history, skip the whole buying-things step entirely. Which I guess is a genuinely new thing to attempt? I can't think of another time a record label and a hardware company teamed up to just deposit an album into hundreds of millions of libraries with no opt-in. That's actually kind of a wild use of the infrastructure when you think about it. But wild doesn't mean welcome.
I tried deleting it Wednesday. Swipe, delete, gone, felt good for about eleven hours. Then I did a routine sync and it came right back, because it's still sitting there in my Apple ID's purchase history and the phone just re-downloads whatever's "owed" to it during a sync. I ended up leaving it alone out of pure exhaustion, which I think is honestly the outcome Apple is fine with here. You get tired of fighting it and it just becomes part of the furniture of your account forever. Somewhere out there someone at Apple's support desk is fielding calls this week from people who are genuinely upset, not because the music is bad, but because nobody asked. There's a real difference between free and unsolicited, and I don't think enough people in Cupertino were in the room to say that out loud before they shipped it.
Anyway. The actual hardware news is fine, I guess. A bigger phone and an even bigger phone, a watch I probably won't buy until the second generation because that's how I've always handled Apple's first-year products (my rule, not a criticism of the product itself, I just like letting other people find the bugs), and a payment system riding on NFC chips that have been sitting unused in phones for years while everyone waited for someone to actually build the software layer on top. Apple Pay might genuinely be the thing that gets tap-to-pay to actually happen in the US, where card companies here have dragged their feet on chip cards for a decade already. That part I'm cautiously into.
But five days later, what I keep coming back to is that an album I didn't choose is still technically mine according to a server somewhere, and there isn't yet any real way to make it not mine again short of digging through account settings that most people don't know exist. Somebody's going to have to build a tool just for removing this thing, mark my words. That's a strange sentence to have typed in 2014, but here we are. Free isn't always free of hassle.
Preorder your bigger phone if you want one. Just go check your Music library first and brace yourself.