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'Sunday Bloody Sunday' is certainly a classic, and it has a powerful meaning - especially when the band play it on their home turf in Ireland. They've done some other good songs too: 'One' is a great track, so is 'With Or Without You'. 'New Years Day' is another.

There are similarities between U2 and Bruce Springsteen, both established themselves as great live acts by slogging themselves around the world concert circuit for years and building up a hardcore fanbase. I've seen both live numerous times. I think once you've established yourself live, and have literally millions of fans worldwide who will come to see you everytime you tour, you have a solid career that won't end anytime soon. The fans will also buy your albums aswell.

Regarding everyone getting U2's album in their i-tunes inbox, I assume people with such accounts gets freebies all the time - perhaps songs by relatively unknown artists though rather than albums by huge artists. I don't know, I don't have one of those accounts. As I said in an earlier comment, this might start a trend and numerous big bands might be willing to take a large lump sum for their work then the whole thing be sent free to millions of people worldwide. Maybe this sort of thing is the future of music. I remember Neil Finn from Crowded House saying some years ago that in America the music industry is "99% dollars and 1% romance". As it is all about commerce now and hardly anything to do with the art bands might just take the cash, watch the album be sent to everyone on i-tunes, and go and buy themselves nice houses with big smiles on their faces - even if they might not have really been into the principle of doing it that way in the first place. An offer of a lot of money for something can be very seductive.

max_tranmere wrote:

> I wonder if any other bands are going to do this 'enforced
> download' thing to vast numbers of people.

I doubt it, it was mainly just a technical issue whereby the album was flagged as 'purchased' on everyones account, and those with automatic downloads turned on awoke to find U2 had installed itself on their devices.

Any future promotions will probably be by redemption code, so that people have to make the decision to download it or not, and not have it forced upon them.

>Regarding everyone getting U2's album in their i-tunes inbox, I assume people >with such accounts gets freebies all the time - perhaps songs by relatively >unknown artists though rather than albums by huge artists

There are freebies available, up until now you just had to make the decision to download them yourself, not had that choice made for you. In this particular case, I din't mind that much, U2 is a neutral experience for me, but if my iTunes library suddenly started automatically filling up with the Simon Cowell Karaoke acts, I'd have something to say.

max_tranmere wrote:

> I wonder if any other bands are going to do this 'enforced
> download' thing to vast numbers of people. As far as I
> understand U2 were given a lump sum of money for the album,
> presumably a very big lump sum


It was 100 million US Dollars.

It was 100 million US Dollars.

With that kind of money you'd think Boneo would be able to buy himself a decent pair of spectacles.

"It was 100 million US Dollars.

With that kind of money you'd think Boneo would be able to buy himself a decent pair of spectacles."

Or even better stop asking people to donate money to the poor people of the world!