Music
U2's 'Songs of Innocence' accounted for 23% of listens on iTunes in January
by Tyler Munro
February 25, 2015
U2’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ stunt totally worked.
Were you annoyed with U2 putting Songs of Innocence in your iTunes library without your permission? Probably. But did you still listen to it? Also probably.
A new study released yesterday — and yes, partly commissioned by the band — has revealed that curiosity got the best of a quarter of iTunes users, noting that U2 accounted for 23 per cent of all music listened to on iOS devices through January. To put that in perspective, iTunes is pushing 1 billion users, last reporting a base of around 850,000,000 back when Songs of Innocence is released. Regardless of whether that number’s gone up, and even when considering that not every iTunes user uses an iOS device, that still puts it in the “very likely” column that close to, or more than, two hundred million people listened to the album.
Did they want to? No. In fact many complained of the invasive album, some clamouring about the illuminati and others simply looking for a way to delete it, but Apple created an opt out page to help remove the albums in September.
Bono, unsurprisingly, was equal parts stoked and aloof.
“This is fantastic news,” he said in a press release. “If these figures suggest that these songs still matter to people, then we’re knocked out. That’s all any songwriter wants.”
The Edge was similarly excited.
It’s nice to know that 5 months on so many people have discovered Songs of Innocence. In the end we just wanted people to hear the album. We took a big risk but today we can say that the experiment worked.
Conducted by the Kantar Group, the study found that 95% of the people listening to Songs of Innocence listened to more than one song. [h/t Consequence of Sound]
