Apple tie-up with U2 branded a 'dismal failure' by music retailers

According to the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), a trade body made up of many of Apple’s online and high street rivals in music retail, including Amazon, HMV, Tesco and Spotify, it has not had the impact on sales U2 may have hoped for.

Almost all of the extra sales were digital downloads, with fewer than 60 U2 albums sold on the high street.

Paul Quirk, chairman of the ERA, said: "This vindicates our view that giving away hundreds of millions of albums simply devalues music and runs the risk of alienating the 60pc of the population who are not customers of iTunes.

"If one of the justifications of this stunt is that it would drive sales of U2's catalogue through the market as a whole, then so far at least it has been a dismal failure.

"Dumping an album in hundreds of millions of iTunes libraries whether people want it or not, reduces music to the level of a software update or a bug-fix or just plain spam.”

Giving away digital music, particularly whole albums, is opposed by many in the industry who believe damaging to the value of recorded music.

Mark Mulligan, an industry commentator, argued that the U2 giveaway was designed to boost concert ticket sales more than revive interest in the band’s back catalogue.

He said: “For a band like U2, who already are way beyond their music sales peak, selling an album was always more about getting bums on seats at concerts, where they make more money than ever.

“Their last album sold poorly so they won’t have been expecting much from this one.

“Sure Apple will have had to pay a heft chunk of cash but they got a nice TV ad out of it too. Considered as a marketing expenditure this is genius.”

Apple upset some customers by forcing Songs of Innocence into their music libraries, however. Yesterday the company released a special one-click tool to allow them to more easily delete it.

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