Apple Spent $100 Million to Buy You That U2 Album, Report Claims
(Mario Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)
As part of its new iPhone and Apple Watch extravaganza Tuesday, Apple announced that it would be granting a free copy of a new U2 album to almost 500 million iTunes customers.
And, no, if you were wondering, U2 didn’t let Tim Cook have its “Songs of Innocence” for cheap. A new report in The New York Times claims that giving away the album to so many people cost Apple a pretty penny.
Here’s Ben Sisario reporting for The Times:
“To release U2’s album free, Apple paid the band and Universal an unspecified fee as a blanket royalty and committed to a marketing campaign for the band worth up to $100 million, according to several people briefed on the deal. That marketing will include a global television campaign, the first piece of which was a commercial that was shown during the event.”
For some perspective, the buzzy startup Secret is valued at around $100 million; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the venerable Washington Post for $250 million in 2013.
For some more perspective, it was recently estimated that Apple brings in about $325,00 per second. So, uh, perhaps it can afford it.
Whether or not that reported $100 million was money well spent is another question. As part of the promotion, the U2 album was automatically downloaded onto the computers, phones, and tablets of hundreds of millions of Apple device owners, whether they were U2 fans or not. Predictably, many of those dissatisfied with the album took to social networks to air their grievances. A reviewer for the music site Pitchfork called the practice “indisputably queasy.” (He also hated the album.)
MORE: Here’s How to Get That U2 Album Off Your iPhone
On the other hand: “Why are people mad Apple gave them a free U2 album?” asked USA Today.
Why, indeed. You can read more about about Apple’s multimillion-dollar U2 gambit in The New York Times. In the meantime: Perhaps Apple could have spent that $100 million on making sure everyone could purchase an iPhone on preorder day?
