Now Bands Are Giving Their Albums Away

mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-album-itunes-chart-apple-release/

Yep

"Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos. John, stay pure. Your credibility, your integrity and your honor are things no company should be able to buy."

This is so true. And it's just not music. Sporting events, which were once pure sport are also now one long media events/corporate advertisements. There are very few public places you can just go and have a pure life experience without getting bombarded with some kind of sales pitch.

I often wonder how much Steve Jobs is laughing at us from his grave, the rich get richer, the poor can be heard but stay poor.
Simple solution we all buy Apple stock and demand that they change the model, of course the rich get even richer when they sell us their stock.
It would be fun to learn why Apple did the U2 deal, IPhone debute? Keep ITunes relevant ? Stock price? U2 is to Cook what the Beatles were to Jobs?

We don't HAVE to make them.  Talk to anyone under 30 - they ALREADY believe music is free.  They have no basis for their dogmatic belief system, so if confronted they will cocoon back into a fairy never, never land of "everything on the internet should be free" dogma, and completely shut you out - OR they will tell you to F-off.

There is no going back.  Only smart thinking.  U2 knows this.  Their manager knows it even better.  They know damn well they would not make 100 million in "sales" via iTunes, so they sold the rights to Apple so that apple could "give" it away.  (i.e.: promotion)  Their manager is laughing/dancing all the way to the bank every morning.  Smartest "business" move any band has made in a decade.  


Find any other band grossing even a 1/10th of 100M on a release.  It isn't happening anymore....  Check the RIAA stats.  A MEGA release might, MIGHT sell gold or platinum now.  And that's nowhere in the vicinity of $100M.  On the U2, Madonna, Stones, Swift, JayZ, Buble, Mars, Mumford, etc. front, it's about MONEY - music is just the product.

If you want to stay alive and are a professional, you have to think smart, fight hard, and adapt.  Anything else puts you into dinosaur land...

if anyone thinks this music is for free then they are the stupid ones.

They gave it to everybody, interesting to see how many return it!

I'd be surprised if U2's catalog titles took a jump anywhere else besides iTunes in the wake of "Songs of Innocence," but frankly, iTunes is the giant of paid digital music distribution.

Lots of folks hate on Apple for various reasons, but history will show Apple saved the music business' ass from extinction, and that should be acknowledged. The major labels completely whiffed the transition to digital sales and distribution, and maybe they couldn't have done it without Apple's hardware/software walled garden even if they'd known what they were doing. Microsoft wouldn't have done it, they're not that imaginative or focused.

Apple created the player/store combo that reminded the general public that they used to buy music, and made it easy to do so. They made it cool enough that even the Windows crowd came over while Microsoft's version of iPod/iTunes tanked. The 70/30 content/Apple split is even reasonable considering the traditional retail/middlemen markup in the old model.

Music's current woes are due to the decline and demise of the music ownership model, which Apple also didn't see coming, the necessity of some kind of free internet "radio" to acquaint and promote the listener with new music, and the latest generation's notion that if you can listen to it for free when you want, why would you pay for it?

I think popular music will survive in the subscription era, but it's not going to be worth what it was in the hard copy days. As Stephen King said in the Dark Tower, "the world moved on."

People disparage the success of a corporation who has anticipated a market for a product they deliver. Why? Government certainly can't and doesn't do it. Governmental power is reactive and motivationally corrupt by nature and structure. If not a corporation lead by visionaries, who?

And it might as well be printed on old news papers because it's not backed by anything. Not to mention the whole market is artificially propped up to begin with.

Here's Tim Cook on Charlie Rose explaining the fundamental difference between Apple and companies like Google. Can you trust him? I don't know.

I do know a tech guy fairly high up at Apple who after the iPhone 5s was released, told me that Apple has no idea what finger print opens your phone, that data is stored only on that particular phone and does not go to any internet destination, and that was a prime directive of doing the fingerprint thing in the first place. Apple also does not have access to your iMessage data either. Apple sells hardware and software product, not your personal data.

blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/09/15/apples-cook-your-data-is-not-our-business/?mod=wsj_nview_latest

So, I was wrong. U2 were handsomely paid, just not by their fans, by Apple. That seems smart, since this is maybe the only way for them to possibly attract a lot of new fans, as they've been around for 3 decades now.

Is this the help you mean…

www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/04/03/streamingstatements

It's not enough to live nor to die.