What does this decision, vetted by dozens of executives I imagine and definitely by Cook himself say about our Cloud-ified technological lives?
Its just crazy to me that they can just throw music into your collection without even asking for permission. There's something really arrogant about Apple right now. I'm not sure what other word could possibly describe this.
What boggles my mind even more is that U2, for all its popularity, is a poorly aging nostalgia act. Heck, I'm an old Gen-X'er and I barely remember their heyday with the Joshua Tree. Tweens and Millenials probably only see them as a band their parents listened to. There's really something off-putting about this. If it was Kanye or something, I could see the appeal, as he's popular now and has a wide-range of fans, but U2? We've long outgrown stale classic rockers and music popularity is very much not this monolithic structure anymore. If anyone should know this, you'd think the guys who run iTunes would.
I personally don't find it as sinister as you make it sound. It's mostly just a user interface/experience issue. I don't see much relevance to privacy issues or the cloudification of life.
In the cloud do you even have a "collection"? It's nothing as tangible as a rack of CDs or even an mp3 file, in this case it is just a UI abstraction over a set of database flags.
Even an mp3 is a UI abstraction over a set of database flags, if you consider the bits on your hard drive to be a database. The cloud provider has a collection, you have access to their collection, and your curated section of their collection is your playlist.
Isn't this merely a continuation of what they started in 2004 when they released their then new album and their entire back catelog on a black and red iPod?
This is opt-in though isn't it? When I signed up for Google Music it asked me what types of music I'm interested in and if it should auto-add similar music to my library.
Its just crazy to me that they can just throw music into your collection without even asking for permission. There's something really arrogant about Apple right now. I'm not sure what other word could possibly describe this.
What boggles my mind even more is that U2, for all its popularity, is a poorly aging nostalgia act. Heck, I'm an old Gen-X'er and I barely remember their heyday with the Joshua Tree. Tweens and Millenials probably only see them as a band their parents listened to. There's really something off-putting about this. If it was Kanye or something, I could see the appeal, as he's popular now and has a wide-range of fans, but U2? We've long outgrown stale classic rockers and music popularity is very much not this monolithic structure anymore. If anyone should know this, you'd think the guys who run iTunes would.