Why are people COMPLAINING about the new U2 album!?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by bcaulf, Sep 13, 2014.

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  1. goombay

    goombay Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    What? Are you getting paid by Bono?
     
    DDTM likes this.
  2. MagneticNorthpaw

    MagneticNorthpaw Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    This is exactly the issue for me. And, in the grand scheme of things, you would think that automatically pushing a band's album onto devices is one of the more innocuous things they could do with the tech.
     
  3. progrocker71

    progrocker71 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Much Ado About Nothing Part 2: The U2 debacle.
     
    Oatsdad likes this.
  4. Maurice

    Maurice Senior Member

    Location:
    North Yarmouth, ME
    I'm a pretty big fan of U2's going back to "October" and I get where people are coming from on this one. I'm kinda dreading that this might be the start of some new sort of big-money promotional campaign for big corporate artists. Sure, you're all fine with it being U2 right now but imagine a possible future when this sort of marketing campaign becomes de rigueur. Image if instead of one U2 album, you're having to prune your Itunes library of unwanted One Direction, Justin Bieber and Keisha albums (or whatever it is that you find simultaneously well-marketed and irritating.) Seems like a slippery slope to me and as audiotom pointed out earlier, not nearly as friendly a model as Radiohead's with "In Rainbows."

    FWIW, I do like this album, a whole lot more than "Horizon" or "Atomic Bomb" and I'm planning on buying the physical edition with the bonus tracks as soon as it's out.
     
  5. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Yes - yes, I am!
     
  6. George Blair

    George Blair Senior Member

    Location:
    Portland, OR
    I downloaded this and sampled the first two tracks. Message to the band: Fire the producers, sell the computers, kill the effects boxes - strip off the hallelujah chorus and play the damn songs in a room with guitar, bass, drums and live vocals. If they did that, which they seem incapable of grasping, they would sound like a great vibrant band with a batch of new songs.
     
  7. goombay

    goombay Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    AHA!!!!!!!
    Many many knowledgeable peeps are still trying to figuring out how to delete by hitting the delete button and you have the gall to say it can be done in 15 seconds!!!!!!!! those 20 billion dollars Bono got from Apple goes a long way. SHAME!
     
  8. JannL

    JannL Forum Resident

    So who is the most important band in the world? By your comment, it would be someone selling more, in their heyday right now. Yet, none of those bands are making some huge mark on the world to make them the most important band. They are just popular bands who have a lot of young fans who help drive sales. So, actually, U2 is just as important as anyone else out there now, and they have a discograpy to back it up. Even their average albums have some brilliant work on them. Some bands have put out some great albums recently, yet beyond some strong sales, I don't see an impact. Even then it's debatable. I consider Reflektor a great album, but many of my Arcade Fire fan friends say they have lost it. I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder.
    You didn't like the album? With the pop elements in it, I would have thought you would like it.
     
  9. Tim Wilson

    Tim Wilson Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kaneohe, Oahu, HI
    I was thinking the same thing. U2 filling stadiums only matters to the people who care about U2. Depeche Mode had the 9th-highest grossing international tour of 2013, ahead of Kenny Chesney, One Direction, Justin Bieber and Jay-Z/Justin Timberlake. How many of the Kenny-Justin-Jay-Justin axis have ever heard of Depeche Mode? Or heard about them because of the tour? Or would be happy to have Depeche Mode show up unbidden on their phones? Or, after listening to Depeche Mode, be glad they'd heard it?

    I'd expect some members in the audience for the 3 older artists have at least heard of Depeche Mode....but, flipping back to the much bigger U2: Justin is 33, and I can think of DOZENS of places I've seen him in the last few years. Gazillions of times on SNL -- even though I don't watch anymore, clips wind up on most of the entertainment news sites I visit -- every awards show, lots of talk shows (again, clips posted on other websites, rather than the shows themselves), videos galore (people still make and watch a LOT of these), on screens in department stores, commercials, movies he's acted in, etc etc. Don't get me started on Jay-Z's visibility. No, don't get me started on Bieber's visibility.

    Where's U2 been? One iPod commercial in 2004, and a couple of awards shows, including a dreadful, unmemorable Oscar performance in February. Even if a 15 year old was staring at the screen, no WAY they'd remember that performance a week later.

    One of the tweets at whoisU2.com mentions that they'd only ever heard of U2 because of one episode of Entourage, but hadn't heard any music. Where would that have happened? Movie soundtracks? Memorable video clips from TV shows? Anything viral on the web? Commercials? These are all things that other bands use to promote themselves (even supposed purists like The White Stripes), and U2 hasn't been there for any of them. I loved U2 in the 80s and 90s, so I'm also aware of the extent of their absence even on classic rock and alternative radio since Beautiful Day. They really have been functionally invisible since the 2002 Super Bowl....and unless they minted some new 15 year old fans that day, that 15 year old could be 27 now and never have given U2 a second thought.

    Radiohead still says that they never made more money from an album than when they did that, even though they gave people the option of paying NOTHING for it -- but they haven't done that since then, nor has Thom done it for Atoms For Peace. There has to be demand to create enough pull to motivate someone to stop what they're doing and go get an album, and my guess is that Radiohead didn't feel they had that kind of pull anymore.

    The whole point of this particular exercise has been U2's admission that they no longer have pull, so not enough people would have gone to get the album for free. I wouldn't have, because I'd stopped caring -- even after my wife and I choosing to honeymoon in Ireland because of how much we loved U2! Pathetic, yes, but that's the trajectory -- rabid fandom to less than zero. The plan worked for me, because I like the album, and will definitely buy it for the bonus tracks. History has shown that U2 saves a lot of good stuff for extras and b-sides.

    My guess is that if they make money from this, Apple will do it again, controversy be damned. And they'll trumpet it proudly as one of their great successes. Remember the whole "you have to hold the phone THIS way," free bumper thing because iPhone 4 couldn't actually hold a call? Nobody cared enough to do more than whine, and nobody remembers. It was Apple's most successful product to date. They can weather all the amount of negative noise that anybody cares to make.
     
  10. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    I've not listened to it yet! :)

    I'm a huge U2 fan but I'm also a devoted physical media guy, so I'm going to wait to listen to it until I get the CD. I deleted it because I didn't want to be tempted to play it until then.

    Irrational? Probably, but I gotta be me! :D
     
    jfeldt and JoeRockhead like this.
  11. Diamond Dog

    Diamond Dog Cautionary Example

    I've been on the fence about U2 since Rattle & Hum where their least-attractive tendencies really started to come to the forefront. I wasn't a hater but I lost interest as they seemed to drift further and further away from what I considered to be the essence of what makes rock music breathe. There was no denying the ever-burgeoning contrivance and ego which enveloped this band and everything they did musically but I wasn't among the "Saint Bono Bashers" and as far as their swerve into blatently corporate rock, it wasn't like they were blazing any new trail there, either. Sure they were too cozy to the corporates and too willing to cozy up to certain types I didn't care for but in return, some good was probably coming of it. And they still served up the occasional catchy little piece of pop among all the lacklustre , pretend-passionate goo they churned out. So really, why would you hate them? Just more innocuous, ignorable background sound and I really had come to expect little else from them other than stadium spectacle and occasionally pleasant but mostly disposable pop music.

    Now this. This whole, over-cooked, supposedly "spontaneous" decision to grant half a billion people this great gift of a new U2 record whether they want it or not, to have it described as U2 doing this for "free" which is obvious ******** and doing it in a way which is intrusive, disrespectful and frankly. a bit creepy. All for what? To set some new benchmark so they could out-Beyonce Beyonce and re-achieve some lost commercial & media dominance? To further stoke the already grotesquely-bloated egos involved? To shift some Apple crap? This whole thing just makes me queezy - the contrivance and the manipulative, calculated nature of it and the sheer unbridled egomania involved with the whole thing from the insipid launch mechanism to the pretentious nature of the project from the album titles on down. This is so removed at this stage from anything having to do with rock'n'roll that they might as well be launching some new brand of toilet tissue.

    I'm off the fence now. **** U2.

    D.D.
     
    Last edited: Sep 14, 2014
  12. First impression--it's interesting but I'm not a fan of all the production touches on the album. What happened to a four piece with three chords and the truth?
     
  13. leeroy jenkins

    leeroy jenkins Forum Resident

    Location:
    The United States
    Apples and oranges. It's one thing to have stuff bundled or pre-loaded when purchasing a new device, quite another to have something pushed to it after the fact. Most people expect to do some fine tuning when they buy a phone or laptop.

    I'm going to require payment to listen to any U2 songs and not a small amount to sit through an entire album. I'm hoping that's the next step in the evolution of this type of marketing. Push some money into my paypal account once they determine that I listened to it.
     
  14. leeroy jenkins

    leeroy jenkins Forum Resident

    Location:
    The United States
    This really is something to be concerned about.
     
  15. Vernoona

    Vernoona Well-Known Member

    insert "Beatles" and you have this forum

    why do you think they're called "Die hard's"?
     
  16. Popmartijn

    Popmartijn Senior Member

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    And to put this "Who is U2" phenomenon in perspective, there are also quite a lot of people who still say "Who is this Justin Timberlake". Even on this forum, some were even proud of it, people did not know who he was. Why he was 'suddenly' the top entertainer last year, continuing into this year. Were wondering why he was playing arenas on his tour.

    So that explains the many "Who is U2" messages. And based on some reactions, U2 made people listen (again).
    (from http://www.whoisu2.com/ )
     
  17. Driver 8

    Driver 8 Senior Member

    All Gaul is divided into three parts.
     
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  18. Stuart S

    Stuart S Back Jack

    Location:
    lv
    You hit it on the Head with just one sentence. There's good songs here beneath the modern mud scum. I call it Danger : Mouse Droppings.
     
  19. xTraPlaylists

    xTraPlaylists I bring order to chaos.

    Location:
    *******, *******
    And despite all this not being ubiquitous, not growing a younger fan base (evidence of this?) if they went on a stadium tour TODAY, they'd still fill up 40k+ seats. Globally. I hate to be that guy that says "It's a fact", but, well, you know...

    I'd love to hear from some 15-year olds who saw the U2 360 tour and see what they have to say about the band. I think we might be surprised.
     
  20. I don't know if this was intended to be a prose poem - but I can dig it, man. :)
     
    KeninDC likes this.
  21. scompton

    scompton Forum Resident

    Location:
    Arlington, VA
    So you wouldn't mind if McAfee was pushed down to your PC for free? After all you can just delete it.
     
  22. folkfreak

    folkfreak The cold blooded penguin

    Location:
    Germany
    In the past I've always said: I would not listen to U2 even if I got it for free.... now I can prove it :)
    I can't tell how much I hate that self-complacent guy...
     
  23. Driver 8

    Driver 8 Senior Member

    For the past several days, U2 have had about 20 of their catalog albums in the iTunes Top 150, so I'm guessing at least some of the kids are liking what they're hearing enough to buy more U2 music. I doubt it's all 45-year-old fans like me who already own the entire back catalog on vinyl and CD who are pushing the catalog into the charts.
     
    goombay likes this.
  24. Actually, it's not that simple - AppleU2 have set it up so that selecting "delete" removes the album but puts you down for an irrevocable pre-order of Songs of Experience, charged to your registered credit card on the day of release. It's all there on p. 237 of the latest iTunes T&C's. That's how they get you.
     
    goombay likes this.
  25. nbakid2000

    nbakid2000 On Indie's Cutting Edge

    Location:
    Springfield, MO
    Huh. I liked the last track Danger Mouse song maybe the best.
     
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