Bono on U2's 2014 iTunes album: "I take full responsibility"

Back in 2014 iTunes customers were shocked to find that U2's Songs of Innocence album had been put on their Apple devices without a choice, and in an excerpt from his new memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story shared in The Guardian, Bono writes about the experiment, calling it "overreach".

Bono reveals in his memoir that he asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to gift the album to iTunes users, to which he responded, "You want to give this music away free? But the whole point of what we’re trying to do at Apple is to not give away music free. The point is to make sure musicians get paid."

""No," I said, "I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?""

The excerpt also reveals that Cook asked Bono if it would just be available to U2 fans, and Bono responded, "I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it."

"See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition," Bono writes. "Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is."

He continues, "If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood."

"I take full responsibility," Bono adds. "Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “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."