U2 frontman Bono personally apologized to thousands of angry iTunes users who were forced to download the band’s latest album Songs of Innocence. The album was automatically uploaded to users’ libraries and devices for free last month after the band performed at Apple’s iPhone 6 launch event.
During a Facebook Q&A session one user wrote in, “Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people’s playlists ever again? It’s really rude.”
“I had this beautiful idea… [we] might have gotten carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that thing,” Bono said in a video response posted to Facebook Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”
U2’s surprise album drop was not a popular move with iTunes users. Social media was flooded with complaints about the stunt and hashtags like #U2Virus and#U2Gate began popping up on Twitter as anger over the forced-fandom grew.
Less than a week after giving away the album Apple was forced to release a tool allowing users to remove Songs of Innocence from their libraries.
The album was downloaded over 26 million times in total.
