Eight years after foisting the U2 album Songs of Innocence onto all Apple iTunes users, frontman Bono is taking responsibility for the gaffe.
In an excerpt from his new memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, published Saturday by The GuardianThe Guardian, the singer-songwriter and activist all but apologized for the walloping his band—and Apple—took in 2014.
"You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting," Bono wrote of his efforts to convince CEO Tim Cook to distribute U2's latest record "as a gift to people"—whether they like the Irish rockers or not. "Critics might accuse me of overreach," he continued. "It is."
Paul David Hewson, known by his stage name Bono, was convinced that even a little pushback from non-fans wouldn't be the end of the world. What was the worst that could happen, he wondered, equating the album appearing in iTunes to getting junk mail or receiving a bottle of milk on your doorstep.
But people can recycle circulars or dump dairy down the drain; iTunes users, however, couldn't rid their audio library of Songs of Innocence.
"We didn't just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town," Bono wrote. "In some cases we poured it on to the good people's cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant."
While plenty of U2 fans surely rejoiced over the free music, others were not thrilled at having content forced into their account without consent—or an easy eraser. Stored in the cloud, Songs of Innocence was nearly impossible to expunge; even if you deleted the local song files, Apple's "gift" remained on display. The company eventually released a tool to more easily pull the album from devices.
"I take full responsibility," Bono said, absolving manager Guy Oseary; bandmades the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr.; and Apple execs Tim Cook and Eddy Cue. "As one social media wisecracker put it," he continued, "'Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.' Or, less kind, 'The free U2 album is overpriced.' Mea culpa."
Nowhere in the published extract did Bono say the word "sorry" or "apologize." But this appears to be his way of begging forgiveness to everyone he hurt with the 48-minute record, made available to more than 500 million iTunes customers in September 2014.
"At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we'd knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs," Bono said. "But quite quickly we realized we'd bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you're working with a company that's about to be the biggest on Earth."