It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall during the planning of the SOI thing. I mean, I know hindsight is 20/20 but not sure how they didn't see potential problems no matter how they did this.
Choice 1 - The one they went with - was a turd
Choice 2 - Pop up asking to accept or decline free U2 album - Ok, so it was sent to like 120 million iphones. Imagine if 20 or even 30 million accepted it. That's HUGE. I mean you're talking the amount of the Joshua Tree in people's hands in one day. But what could have or would have been the headline?
"U2 offers new album for free to Apple users - 90 million of them don't want it!"
Choice 3 - The same as choice 1, but allowed people to easily delete it off their phones. In a week or two, you would see stories like - 120 million people were gifted U2's new album - 60 million have gotten rid of it"
Choice 4 - And definitely the safest. Would have been if they would have done an "Accept or Decline" pop up, for purchasing the album for the minimum cost to count as a sale - $4.49. They may have gotten a couple million, who knows. Even if it were only six or seven hundred thousand, that would be great, although it may have still been twisted into a failure.
But this one I think would have been pretty low risk. Lots of artists have had their albums available for discounted prices for a week or two on Apple, so it wouldn't have been anything too out of the norm. The only new part would be having Apple send an actual invite to buy it.
And the reward, could have been the biggest weekly album sale number in history.