U2

Apple releases tool to delete U2 album

Life
(Image: Apple)

16 September 2014

Apple today provided a tool to customers who want to delete the free U2 album, Songs of Innocence, that the company automatically downloaded to their iPhones and other devices.

The tool, available from an Apple URL, removes the album from a user’s iCloud account.

After last week’s introduction of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch – a news conference where U2 closed the event with a live performance – Apple made Songs of Innocence free to every customer who had an iCloud account. That’s essentially every iOS and OS X device owner.

Some immediately flipped out over the free album, either because they didn’t care for U2, because the album was consuming storage space on their already-crammed iPhones, iPads or Macs, or simply on principle. They didn’t want Apple to force-feed something to their hardware without their express permission.

Apple distributed the album using iCloud, its sync and storage service, so only those who had enabled Automatic Downloads for Music found that the tracks had actually downloaded to local storage on their devices. (In iOS, that’s available under Settings > iTunes & App Store.)

If there are small cloud icons next to each track, the album is still in iCloud, has not yet been downloaded to the device, and will not be until the songs are played.

Apple customers got even angrier when they found out that they could not delete Songs of Innocence from their devices, prompting numerous websites and publications, including CNET, to spell out instructions for deleting it from local storage, then hiding it from view to prevent it reappearing.

The album-removal tool offered a faster way to banish the band; if the songs have already been downloaded to local storage, they must still be manually deleted, however.

Computerworld

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