What Marketers Can Learn from the iTunes/U2 Debacle

Caid Christiansen• October, 30 2015

Just about a year ago, an interesting thing happened. One of the biggest brands with the most loyal customer bases gave away–for absolutely free–an album from one of the best selling bands of all time.

On September 9, 2014 Apple announced that the new album from “legendary rock band U2” would be a free giveaway for iTunes subscribers–giving the album to over half a billion iTunes customers around the world.

How did such a great idea go poorly enough that by October, U2 frontman Bono would apologize on his Facebook one month later, saying “Oops… I’m sorry about that”?

There were a couple of big miscalculations on the part of Apple that led to this campaign topping AdWeek’s “13 Biggest Brand Fails of 2014” list.

You can’t force your “gift” on your customers: Probably the biggest mistake was that, in the release, Apple pushed the album out to the devices of millions of Apple customers. The download was not optional–if you had an iTunes account, the album showed up on your device without any action–which upset a lot of users. An opt-in strategy would have been far more effective.

You can’t give customers a gift that’s really not free: While there was no cost to the device users to get the music, it still took up space on their device. Because Apple device memory is not expandable, this forced download actually had a real cost to users–one that Apple didn’t consider. And, because it took Apple a week before they allowed customers to delete this “gift,” this cost was real and upsetting to customers who did not want to waste storage on the album.

You have to understand the broader sentiment of your brand: While it’s true that Apple’s customers are huge fans, Apple was also just coming off bad publicity regarding their invasiveness and lax data tracking. Pushing out the content to devices, unrequested, lent credence to the ongoing criticism.

You have to understand what your customers actually want: While it’s true that U2 was a legendary rock band, their relevance to Apple’s core user base was relatively small. Worldwide sales of U2’s prior album “No Line on the Horizon” totaled only 5 million copies. While that’s a lot of albums, those figures mean that the release was meaningful to only about 1% of the people that Apple distributed the music to. That means this “gift” was meaningless noise, at best, and in many cases a painful disruption to 99% of their user base.

It would be hard to top the colossal marketing catastrophe that was the iTunes/U2 collaboration, but nonetheless, these takeaways still provide valuable advice for all brands.