Apple Releases Fix To Delete That U2 Album You Never Wanted

Apple’s release of the U2 album Songs of Innocence may soon join the long history of marketing campaigns gone horribly awry, a list that includes New Coke, or Reebok’s infamous Dan and Dave ads. For the moment, however, Apple appears to be trying to make things right, releasing a fix that will allow you to get rid of the U2 album.

If you’re not familiar with what happened, here’s the short version: Last week, to promote the new U2 album Songs of Innocence and the upcoming release of the iPhone 6, Apple automatically uploaded the album to some 500 million iTunes users. There were three problems with this, which no one at Apple apparently saw coming:

• 1) The number of iTunes users who actually wanted the new U2 album was something considerably less than 500 million. Rapper Tyler, the Creator, told The Independent that having an unwanted U2 album automatically installed on his iPhone was like “waking up with an STD.”
• 2) The new U2 album… well, we will be professional and say that it got mixed reviews. Newsweek’s review, for example, makes liberal use of the words “grating,” “bland,” and “suffocatingly overstuffed.”
• 3) There was no way to get rid of it (until now). iTunes users could manually delete each of the songs from the new U2 album, but the album would still show up as “purchased” in the users’ purchase history, regardless. At this point, that’s more of a cosmetic complaint than anything else, but if you want to keep your iTunes library free of even the mention of U2, then this creates a problem.

Needless to say, the stunt went horribly awry. Customer reaction was instant and almost universally negative. In the final analysis, the marketing gimmick may cost Apple upwards of $100 million, according to this Inquisitr report.

The good news is that Apple has released a fix for users who don’t want any reminder of the Songs of Innocence debacle: Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr, via Recode, explains the fix.

“Some customers asked for the ability to delete ‘Songs of Innocence’ from their library, so we set up http://www.itunes.com/soi-remove to let them easily do so. Any customer that needs additional help should contact AppleCare.”

Were you one of the people that got an unwanted U2 album that you couldn’t get rid of? Let us know below.

[Image courtesy of: Musiclipse]