Comment by mort96
2 days ago
I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done, because so much of what makes it a bad idea is a consequence of the rest of the system.
Imagine if everything else surrounding the Apple ecosystem worked better. Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself. Imagine if people who do use Apple Music never had an album play without being actively interacted with. Imagine if the album cover wasn't low-key softcore gay porn. Imagine if you could "uninstall" an album you own, like how you can uninstall an app you own and never ever see it again unless you actively go out of your way to search for it on the App Store.
Would it still have been a violation of consent? Sure, yeah it would. But almost everything people complain about is related to how it starts to play when they don't want to (an issue with iOS/macOS and Apple Music that would be annoying regardless), or how the album cover sometimes unintentionally pops up on your screen (such as when you hit the play/pause button on Mac when macOS doesn't think that there's any active paused media, so macOS opens Apple Music), or how there is no way for them to get rid of the album once they own it. These things are pretty large problems regardless of Songs of Innocence.
I can sort of understand an engineer thinking that surely there can't be any major downsides to just giving away a digital good. And if the rest of iOS, macOS's, Apple Music and the album itself didn't have all these issues, it wouldn't have been much of an issue. Again, it would've been a consent violation, but developers at tech companies aren't exactly known for valuing consent anyway and everyone would've certainly forgot it by now.
> Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself.
Nice dream. My wireless headphones act like in the manual when paired with my phone, but the buttons on them always start apple music when paired with my laptop instead of muting or controlling noise canceling.
>> I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done
I don't even think it was a terrible idea. It was just one of those things lots of people irrationally hooked on to. "We're giving you all a free record". Enough people made it 'bad' because people like to make a fuss. The only real issue with it was the inability to remove it which they later rectified.
Eh no, sorry. The practical result is that a ton of people who have absolutely no interest in U2 has Songs of Innocence start playing when they don't want it. It plays when people turn on their cars. It plays when people connect to Bluetooth speakers. It plays when people want to resume Spotify playback but Spotify got killed in the background. It plays when people want to resume the YouTube video they were watching but macOS lost track of what's paused. It's a truly terrible idea in practice.
Apple didn't really rectify the inability to remove it. They released a removal tool, but that tool is long defunct. The only way to remove it these days is to contact Apple Support, from what I can tell on the web.