In an interview with The New York Times (gift link), Bono talks about the band’s manager’s opposition to forcing a U2 album into every iTunes library.
Bono: He said pretty much the same thing that Tim Cook said when I pitched him the idea, which is: You spent your whole life getting people to pay for music. Why would you want to give something away for free? I mean, we were experimenting. We wanted to see if we could get Apple or another company to pay for our music and then they distribute it. And look, it’s going to take some experimentation to fix the music [business]. It’s astonishing how little other musicians are paid and it’s frightening. But yeah, that was all on me.
Was it a reputational error for you?
Bono: I went too far on that one.
The Edge: We take risks. We have to. So you fail, you fall on your face at times. That’s part of the gig.
There’s also something hilarious to me about the staid New York Times needing to refer to The Edge as The Edge.
