Wondering what it cost Apple to give away that U2 album to every customer?
If you were wondering how much it cost Apple to give away a copy of U2’s Songs of Innocence album to every customer, the answer, according the the New York Times, is more than $100M.
To release U2’s album free, Apple paid the band and Universal an unspecified fee as a blanket royalty and committed to a marketing campaign for the band worth up to $100 million, according to several people briefed on the deal. That marketing will include a global television campaign, the first piece of which was a commercial that was shown during the event.
Yep, that album that ended up on many people’s iPhones uninvited cost Apple whatever the royalty fee is for half a billion downloads plus a further $100M spend on marketing it. Nice. Perhaps the band will be donating a portion of it to Project RED?
Bono and Cook joked around about the cost during the keynote, with Bono telling Cook “you would have to pay for it, because we’re not going in for the free music around here.”
