"We’re not going in for the free music around here."

If anything, the $100 million figure, while eye popping at first, really highlights how devalued music has become as a commercial commodity, especially compared with the devices and software we use to listen to it. Over at Pitchfork, Rob Mitchum brilliantly laid out the diminished state of the record industry and the ascension of free as the dominant paradigm for artistic consumption.

Time was, the recipe for a superstar artist to create a Big Event Album was well known—a few teaser ads in the music mags, a lead single for radio, some late-night talk show appearances, then sit back and watch the fans line up at the record store on release day. But now that basically every entity in that sentence has been culturally marginalized, and the propeller churn of social media refuses to tolerate slow-burn marketing, the best—and, perhaps, only—way to get everyone talking about your record at once is to release it with no warning. U2 being U2, they’ve taken that strategy one step over the line into indisputably queasy territory, aligning with their old friends Apple to insert their new album, Songs of Innocence, into all of our libraries without consent. By updating the old Columbia House Record Club scam to the digital age, U2 and their Cupertino buddies have created a new avenue of opt-out cultural transmission, removing even the miniscule effort it takes to go to a website and click "Download."