U2 offers new album for free to iTunes users

U2 surprised the world today by releasing Songs of Innocence, their first album in five years, as a gift from Apple, available for free immediately to anyone with iTunes. The band made the announcement with Apple CEO Tim Cook at a Cupertino press conference for the new iPhone 6, capping the event with a performance of the album's first single, "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)." After a standing ovation, Cook said, "Wasn't that the most incredible single you ever heard? We would love a whole album of that."



"The question is now, how do we get it to as many people as possible, because that's what our band is all about," Bono said. "I do believe you have over half a billion subscribers to iTunes, so — could you get this to them?" "If we gave it away for free," Cook replied. And five seconds later, the album was unleashed in the largest album release of all time. "We wanted to make a very personal album," Bono told Rolling Stone's Gus Wenner the day before the press conference in an exclusive interview. "Let's try to figure out why we wanted to be in a band, the relationships around the band, our friendships, our lovers, our family. The whole album is first journeys — first journeys geographically, spiritually, sexually. And that's hard. But we went there."



The band worked on Innocence for two years with producer Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton), then brought in additional help: Flood, their collaborator since 1987's The Joshua Tree, plus Adele producers Paul Epworth and Ryan Tedder. "I think having them around really helped," says Bono, "Some of the music out there now that people call pop, it's not pop – it's just truly great. And we wanted to have the discipline of the Beatles or the Stones in the Sixties, when you had real songs. There's nowhere to hide in them: clear thoughts, clear melodies."



To begin, the band went back to its roots: Bono says the group listened to the music they loved in the Seventies, from punk rock to Bowie, glam rock, early electronica and Joy Division. The album kicks off with "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)," a loping pop song laced with distinctly punk-ish power chords. "I found my voice through Joey Ramone," says Bono, "because I wasn't the obvious punk-rock singer, or even rock singer. I sang like a girl — which I'm into now, but when I was 17 or 18, I wasn't sure. And I heard Joey Ramone, who sang like a girl, and that was my way in." The driving, reggae-tinged "This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now," is a tribute to the Clash, with slinky guitars from the Edge that nod to Sandinista!. "After we saw the Clash, it was a sort of blueprint for U2," says Bono. "We knew we couldn't possibly hope to be as cool, and that's proven to be true, but we did think we could get behind a sort of social justice agenda."



There is also an intensely personal song about Bono's mother, Iris Hewson, who died when he was 14. "Forty years ago, my mother fell at her own father's funeral, and I never spoke with her again," he says. "Rage always follows grief, and I had a lot of it, and I still have, but I channeled it into music and I still do. I have very few memories of my mother, and I put a few of them in a song called 'Iris.'" The most joyous track on Songs of Innocence is "California (There Is No End to Love)," which unexpectedly nods to the Beach Boys in its intro. "It's like the sun itself," says Bono. "It's about our first trip to Los Angeles." The darkest track, meanwhile, is "Raised by Wolves," which tells of a deadly car bombing in Dublin. "It was a real incident that happened in our country where three car bombs were set to go off at the same time in Dublin on a Friday night, 5:30," says Bono, "On any other Friday I would have been at this record shop, just down the corner, but I cycled to school that day."

Some people must still love paying for music. Even though every citizen on the planet with access to iTunes had the chance to download the new U2 album for free, roughly 29,000 souls chose to lay down hard cash for it anyway. That's according to official numbers from Nielsen/SoundScan for “Songs of Innocence.”

The album was available for free between Sept. 9 and Oct. 14. The figures just measured by Billboard arrived during its initial sales week period, which ended Sunday. The 29,000-plus sales figure was just enough to sneak the album into Billboard’s Top Ten. It landed at No. 9.



Unsurprisingly, 95% of U2's sales came in physical form, since those who wanted to download the music could have done so by that method during the free grace period. A full 90%, or 26,000 copies, were sold on CD while 5%,, or 1500 copies, came on vinyl. Only 4% of sales (of 1200 units) were digital downloads, according to Nielsen/SoundScan.

It’s likely that many of the sales came from a deluxe version of the album, not available until last week. That package includes four extra songs (including two remixes and two previously unavailable tracks), plus six acoustic versions of songs from the original work. iTunes has said that 26 million people globally downloaded the entire official U2 album and 81 million consumers listened to some portion of it.