15th
Mad About U2
The inordinate amount of actual anger directed at Apple and U2 over this is so disproportional to the actual event, I’ve started to wonder about the mental state of some of those complaining. It’s really been off the charts.
If you fall into that camp, let me speak very plainly: I have no sympathy for you. I have trouble thinking of a more self-indulgent, “first world problem” than saying “I hate this free new album I’ve been given.”
I appreciate that this topic has zero significance in comparison to any of the genuinely terrible things that have been happening in the world in 2014. But if we’re going to talk about it, let’s talk about it right, and this analysis is way off the mark.
No one is angry about receiving a gift. People are offended by the way the gift was given: without warning or fanfare, it just appeared in your iTunes library. Imagine waking up to a fruit basket from a well-meaning acquaintance, except instead of on your doorstep it’s sitting ominously on your kitchen counter. Do you shrug and chow down on a nectarine, or do you change your locks?
Music collections are deeply personal, and to young people, they can be surprisingly wrapped up in identity. Back when CDs and cassettes were the thing, my friends and I would collect and proudly house them in elaborate alphabetized racks. Every cramped freshman dorm room had several cubic feet devoted to this purpose. You wouldn’t visit a friend for the first time without spending at least a few minutes arms folded, waist bent, scanning tiny lettering on 25 or 50 or a couple hundred plastic spines. It was smalltalk; it was a courtship display. Wait a sec, you’re into Genesis?! Oh, just the early stuff. Cool, cool.
We’ve surrendered the physical trappings, but the connotations remain. And I think Apple didn’t see this because — no matter how deeply they insist music runs in their DNA — from the perspective of the iTunes Store, “library” means licensed content the user is currently authorized to stream or download. But due to various design decisions Apple’s made over the years, that’s not what it means to anyone else. I’d wager that to a majority of iTunes users, “library” means my personally curated collection of stuff that I enjoy and feel comfortable associating with my identity. Messing with that is, to be frank, nothing short of a violation.
It takes a certain degree of empathy to get that a music collection isn’t the same thing as a Facebook feed, and empathy in marketing decisions at this level is rare. But any company that hopes to gain our trust in mediating intimacy ought to be much better at figuring this stuff out.