Apple Lets iTunes Users Scrub Bono From Their Library with U2 Songs of Innocence Removal Option

At the end of last week’s iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event, Apple partnered with U2 to deliver the band’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, for free to the more than 500 million iTunes users around the world. It was an unprecedented move that made the award-winning Irish rock band’s latest offering the biggest initial album release of all time. The only problem? Some people really hate U2, prompting Apple Monday to release a method that disgruntled customers can use to remove the album from their account.

Apple’s process for giving all of its iTunes customers Songs of Innocence for free was to simply grant “purchased” status of the album to every account. iTunes users who wanted the album merely had to download the songs from their “Purchased” history on the iTunes store.

But iTunes has evolved significantly over the past few years, and services like iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud give users who have enabled these features access to their entire purchased iTunes library without initiating any downloads from the iTunes store. Still other customers have older iTunes features, such as one that automatically downloads new purchases, enabled on their Macs, PCs, or iDevices. Therefore many iTunes users, especially those who were unaware of Apple’s promotion with U2, launched iTunes or the iOS Music app last Tuesday afternoon and were perplexed to find an album they never purchased sitting in their libraries.

The results of this confusion can be seen in the iTunes ratings for Songs of Innocence. Although positive reviews now outweigh the negatives, the situation was a bit more interesting in the hours and days after the promotion’s launch. A nearly fifty/fifty split of five-star to one-star reviews plagued the album, with the majority of positive reviews praising Apple and U2 and a majority of the negative reviews asking key questions such as “What is U2?” and “I didn’t buy this, did Apple charge me?” But the overall theme from users was simple: “I don’t want this. If I wanted it, I would have bought it. Get it off my iPhone.”

Not wanting to push the issue, perhaps so soon after being questionably linked to the recent celebrity photo scandal, Apple has now given iTunes customers a quick and easy way to scrub their accounts of the new U2 album. Any iTunes user who doesn’t want Songs of Innocence to mar their music collection can visit this page and elect to remove the album from their account. Users choosing this route should note, however, that this process removes the album not only from a user’s iTunes library, but also from their purchased history as well. This means that if you ever change your mind in the future, you’ll have to pay to get the album again.

U2’s Songs of Innocence is the band’s thirteenth studio album, and is available exclusively on iTunes and Apple’s recently acquired Beats Music service until October 13th, after which a broader digital and physical release will follow.