Here is what is not being said as the new U2 enters into the known universe: how many people are gonna download it? And the reason it isn’t being said is because the number is irrelevant for a number of reasons:
1. Since it was sent automatically to your library, you don’t need to download it to hear it in the cloud. I seldom download my Itunes movies because I don’t want em taking so much time space of my hard drive. Indeed the same is true of my music. There is no reason not to leave em in the cloud so a small number is irrelevant.
2. But a large number of downloads is irrelevant also. Just because you download a free album doesn’t mean you listen to it, and since there are no streaming numbers either, it also doesn’t tell you how many times you’ve listened to it.
Consider the new U2 album the Village Voice of rock. When I used to have to pay a coupla of bucks for VV I would read it cover to cover but once it became free, I treated it with indifference. If it didn’t cost anything, what exactly was its value to me?
That’s the problem for U2. It is the worst of all worlds (except for fiscal: they are deep in bed with Apple. They have an album on the hand, a major telling of the bands story, a major example of what their actual value is, because we know they can sell out stadiums, we know they will make 250 million bucks on the road, what we don’t know is how popular they are as a modern rock band and not a nostalgia act. This is a huge question mark and the facts are now hidden from just about everyone. You can’t count cloud streams, so you can’t tell the full story. Or even most of it.
My bet? It would have stalled at a little over a million units Stateside.
