Though they released Songs of Innocence for free, U2 got paid in a big way by Apple, who reportedly invested $100 million into the album’s creation and the subsequent iPhone-hawking ad campaign. The longtime partnership between the Irish band and the tech giant has more in store for the world in the form of a “secret project” that could revolutionize the music industry and help artists get compensated for their work.
The details of the plan are relatively vague, coming to us from a preview of Time magazine’s upcoming cover story on the band. “Bono tells Time he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music — whole albums as well as individual tracks,” says the report. “The point isn’t just to help U2 but less well known artists and others in the industry who can’t make money, as U2 does, from live performance. ‘Songwriters aren’t touring people,’ says Bono. ‘Cole Porter wouldn’t have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn’t coming to a stadium near you.'”
There are no more details on this new format, so we’re left wondering if this just U2’s version of Pono, Neil Young’s long-in-the-works high-quality music player. Whereas Young thinks MP3s just don’t give listeners the proper sound, U2 seem like they’re more concerened with the bottom line. After all, in another interview with Time, Bono said, “I don’t believe in free music. Music is a sacrament.”
We’ll have to wait and see if U2 can really save the music industry, though the fact that they couldn’t even save Spider-Man on Broadway doesn’t give us too much hope.
