Here's How to Purge Your iTunes of That Horrid U2 Album

After pushing out the new U2 album to its 800 million iTunes users last week, Apple has finally released instructions for deleting it from iTunes for good. Here’s how to deBono-fy.
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Island Records

At the close of Apple’s media event last week, CEO Tim Cook announced that all iTunes users would be getting U2’s newest album, Songs of Innocence, for free, right then and there. “Sweet, a free U2 album!” you’d think the public would have cried. Wrong. Apparently, much of the iTunes-using populace agrees that U2 hasn’t put out a good album since Achtung Baby.

If you were one of the 800 million iTunes users who allowed purchased content to automatically download to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or computer, all of a sudden here was nearly 27 minutes of rhyming Bono cliches. Even worse, you couldn’t delete the album for the first week because it showed up as a “past purchase” in the iTunes Music Store. Thankfully, Apple has finally addressed its U2 problem.

The company has a support page detailing removal instructions, but we’ll outline the process here. First, go to https://itunes.com/soi-remove and confirm you want to remove Songs of Innocence by clicking “Remove Album.” Sign in with the same Apple ID you normally use for iTunes Store purchases, and then you’ll get a confirmation message that the album has been forcefully removed from your account.

Whew, order has been restored, the universe is at peace, and most importantly, you don’t have to live in fear of your shuffle playlist. It’s a beautiful day.