U2 have a new album. This time, we’re the ones paying, not them

Free music?” asked Tim Cook. “Are you talking about free music?” The way Bono tells it, Apple’s chief executive needed some convincing. The U2 singer wanted the tech giant to buy the band’s new album and give it to everybody. Surely such a clever company could recoup the cost somehow?

The year was 2014 and the album was called Songs of Innocence. You can’t make this stuff up.

This week, U2 – Ireland’s most magnanimous gift to rock – release Carnaval de Luz, their first album of new songs in nine years. “Bring your purple socks, your broken hearts, your rose-tinted naivety,” their frontman advises. That last thing might take some finding. “Hide yo iPhones!” was one snarky Reddit comment.

That cosy Apple chat led to Innocence landing in half a billion iTunes accounts without users’ consent or, until the backlash grew, any clear means of removal. It was a PR disaster for a band not unknown for overreaching pratfalls (see PopMart, saving world, hats). “The free U2 album is overpriced,” was a remark Bono was still processing in his 2022 memoir, Surrender.

“What was the worst that could happen?” he wrote. It would be “like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood”. What he learnt was that “some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose-intolerant.”

It wasn’t just U2 intolerance that they had failed to account for. Anger and suspicion about big tech’s reach into our private lives was everywhere that year. Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance were simmering. Facebook confessed it had manipulated nearly 700,000 feeds for an experiment in emotional contagion.

Just before the U2 giveaway, Apple had been forced to defend its security after hackers stole intimate photos of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton from iCloud accounts. Against this backdrop, finding Bono on your playlist was like finding weird traces of silicon in your undies drawer.

A dozen years later, Carnaval de Luz enters a world, according to Island Records, “of dark encroaching forces”. They don’t mention any big tech companies by name but knowing Bono, he would have their numbers in his phone.

For all their many moments of proper brilliance, proximity to power had long been this band’s Achilles heel. Bono’s cosying up to leaders such as George W. Bush is credited with advancing African debt relief and the fight against AIDS. But as an ideal, rock’n’roll stands outside throwing stones, not inside sipping tea.

“Subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth,” he conceded in his book. For a band that built its reputation on fighting the good fight for the small guy, Songs of Innocence was more about corporate entitlement than punk anarchy.

To be fair, Bono didn’t invent using music as a loss leader to harvest fans’ data. By 2014, Spotify was already training us to rent access to the world’s record library so it could collect in perpetuity. The following year, Apple would launch its own subscription service.

It was an early sign, though, of an unfortunate commercial truth. Corporate players have the clout to negotiate their splits with big tech. For the vast majority of musicians, the emerging business model would mean competing for crumbs while monster acts and major labels take the lion’s share of the streamers’ billions.

U2 have survived and prospered. Streams and sales and tours have kept their legend booming. The late, universally adored Dolly Parton even appears on Carnaval de Luz, co-writing and singing a duet billed as her final recorded performance. But for many, that 12-year-old grievance just won’t go away.