The particular trouble with gift-giving is that you never quite know how your present will be received. Sure, the receiver might feign gratitude, but you never know if your gift will end up buried in the back of a cupboard or worse, end up in a regifting pile. In 2014, in a bold gesture, Apple and U2 did a very kind gesture of teaming up and giving away their next album, whether you wanted to listen to the Songs Of Innocence.

Songs of Innocence is an 11-song album from U2. If you gave it a listen, you’d probably agree that the songs on it sound very much like what you’d expect from the band, so many decades into their career. Acclaimed producer Flood, who worked on some of the greatest albums from Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and, of course, U2, returns to help. Danger Mouse, half of the acclaimed Gnarls Barkley duo. Complete with the band, the 11 tracks make for an interesting album, one that sounds like U2 for the modern age.

This all may sound perfectly typical for the band, especially if you’ve been watching their success from afar. The album was digitally released to all Apple accounts, regardless of consent. Whether you like U2 or not, whether you wanted to be with the album or without it. There it was in your collection. People do like free stuff, and as one of the lucky hundreds who were given this album for gratis by Apple, I feel I gave the album more of my time than I would have done without it. There are some issues, of course, the automatic download that many people have available on their phones could eat into resources. Fans who belong to the Android ecosystem also couldn’t get to download the album for a long while, too.

So this stunt might have given some music fans a poor impression of the album, with streaming quickly becoming the primary way generations interact with music, even the free download might not be enough to win people over. Which is a shame, as alluded to earlier, some songs on the album are rather nice. I particularly liked the soundscape on The Troubles, and listened to that song a few times since its release. The album’s music is very introspective, drawing on the band’s early influences and packaged in a way that feels similar to the modern-rock sound of the mid-2010s.

Over a decade on, U2 continue to rock out, only this time opting for more traditional methods of getting their music out to fans. The issues of music discovery, music ownership, and even its value continue to rage on. Sounds of Innocence is a very fascinating experiment. Not being the first time that Apple gave away free downloads, only for the scheme to backfire on them and their partners. Even if you weren’t the biggest U2 fan, though, there was a chance that even you got to hear the Songs of Innocence.

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