“Over the weekend, U2 frontman Bono sat down for an interview with Dave Fanning on the Irish radio station 2FM where the two discussed a wide range of topics,” Yoni Heisler reports for TUAW. “While the interview mostly centered on the band’s new album, Bono took some time to touch on a few Apple related items.”
Some snippets of Bono’s comments:
• The same people who used to write on toilet walls when we were kids are now in the blogosphere. The blogosphere is enough to put you off of democracy [laughs]. But no, let people have their say. Why not? They’re the haters, we’re the lovers, we’re never going to agree.
• No one has deleted more U2 songs in the last 5 years than the 4 members of U2.
• Why can’t I use my phone or my iPad to disappear into a world created by artists with photography? If we want to listen to Miles Davis in a silent way, why can’t we have the photographs of Herman Leonard playing in the background while we do it? Or, with another click find out what mood he was in when he made that? Or with lyrics, why can’t we read Bob Dylan’s lyrics while we’re listening to his music at a certain point in time? … 5 years ago I began a conversation with Steve Jobs at my house in France and I said to Steve: “How is it that for a person who cares about the way things look and feel more than anyone else in the world that iTunes looks like a spreadsheet?” …So he made a promise to me that we would work on this together, and with the team at Apple we’ve been doing it for years, and it’s not ready yet for Songs of Innocence, it will be ready for Songs of Experience.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iTunes LP redux for iOS?
Visuals can be great, but, for most people, most of the time that they are listening to music, they are doing something else with their eyes, like driving, exercising, dancing, or working. It might seem to someone in the music industry like Bono that people will consider what he’s working on with Apple to be indispensable. They will not. If you try to force album-only sales, people will simply pirate music.
So far, every concoction meant to goose sales of forced bundles, what the music biz calls an “album,” have failed. iTunes LP? Most people have no idea what that even is.
No amount of visual doodads this side of “celebrity nudes” (and no, Bono, don’t get any bright ideas!) are going to change the fact that most of the time people listen to music, they are doing something else with their eyes.
