The U2 Album That Will Not Die

So it's launch weekend. Everybody I follow on Twitter either stood in an Apple Store line on Friday for an iPhone 6 or is currently writing 2,000 words about why they didn't. I'm not going to pile onto that today — there are approximately eleven thousand posts about the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus going up across the internet right now and mine would just be noise. (For the record: I didn't go. My 5s is a year and a half old and fine. I'll probably cave in November when the initial-batch shipping delays clear out.)

What I actually want to complain about is smaller and dumber and, weirdly, still not resolved for me ten days later: the U2 album.

You know the one. Apple dropped "Songs of Innocence" into the iTunes library of every single iTunes account on earth back on the 9th, for free, whether you wanted it or not. Half a billion accounts, apparently. It just showed up. No opt-in, no "hey do you want this," just there, in your Purchased tab, mixed in with music you actually bought. People were furious, which honestly I understand even though it's "just a free album" — there's something genuinely unsettling about a company being able to write into your personal media library without asking. Tim Cook did an interview a few days later basically saying it was meant as a gift and he was surprised by the reaction. I believe him that it was well-intentioned. I don't think that makes it less weird.

Apple put out a standalone removal tool on the 15th, a little web page where you type in your Apple ID and it scrubs the album out of your account. I ran mine that same night. Felt very efficient about it, closed the tab, moved on with my life.

Except it's not actually gone. I opened iTunes on my laptop tonight to queue up some podcasts before bed and there it is again, sitting in my iCloud purchase history like a stain that keeps coming back after you wash it. The local file is gone, sure. But the "you own this" record apparently lives somewhere deeper than the removal tool reaches, and if you go poking around iCloud Music Library or re-download your purchases it can resurface. I've seen a few other people mention the same thing in forum threads this week, so I don't think I'm imagining it or doing something wrong on my end. It's just a weirdly sticky piece of metadata that Apple's quick-fix tool doesn't fully unstick.

Is this a big deal? No, obviously not, it's a free U2 album and the band is fine, Bono is fine, nobody's life is materially worse. But I keep coming back to the fact that this whole saga is a pretty good little case study in why "free" and "automatic" are a bad combination when it's your own storage and your own account being written to. If Apple had just put a banner up saying "hey, new U2 album, click here to add it to your library," approximately nobody would have cared, some people would've even liked it. Instead they did the thing directly, at scale, without asking, and then had to build emergency tooling four days later to let people undo it. That's not nothing. That's a company shipping a feature and then shipping a bug fix for the feature being unwanted.

I'll also say, purely as a music opinion and not a tech one: I've listened to the record twice now since it kept reappearing and it's fine? It's a U2 album. It sounds like a U2 album made by a band that has been extremely famous since before I was born trying to sound a little more like 2014. "The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)" is the only track I'd actually put on a playlist voluntarily. The rest kind of washes over me the way most stadium rock does these days, which might just be a me problem at this point, I don't listen to much guitar music anymore.

Anyway. I'm going to try the removal tool again tomorrow and see if it sticks this time. If any of you are also still finding it lurking in your Purchased tab a week and a half later, I'd be curious to know if you've found an actual permanent fix or if we're all just stuck periodically deleting an Irish rock album from our phones until the heat death of the universe.

Back to regular posting soon. There's an iPhone sitting on my desk that isn't mine that I'm supposed to be looking at for a friend, so maybe I'll have real first-impressions thoughts on the 6 Plus size question later this week after all.