Bono is sorry U2’s new album automatically showed up on your iTunes

Elahe Izadi (c) 2014, The Washington Post. Recall all of the outrage last month when Apple, in trying to give the gift of U2 to the world, did so by basically forcing the band’s latest album on you? “Songs of Innocence” showed up on iTunes’ latest purchases — for free_ whether you wanted it or not.

The gall! The nerve! Well, Bono has something he would like to say: “Oops. Um. I’m sorry about that.”

The band posted a video on its Facebook page Tuesday, in which they answered questions submitted by the public. One such person wrote: “Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people’s playlists ever again? It’s really rude.”

That’s when Bono gave that groveling sorry above. He went on to say:

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“I had this beautiful idea and we got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”

Megalomania. Generosity. Self-promotion. Deep fear. Yup, that sums the whole thing up quite nicely. You gotta hand it to him: the man is self-aware.

Last month, Apple called the move the largest album release in history. And while the album did show up in latest purchases, it didn’t actually download, so it didn’t take up space on iPhones and such. Nevertheless, the backlash was so bad that Apple subsequently released a tool to allow users to get rid of the thing that Washington Post critic Chris Richards described as “dystopian junk mail.”