Nearly 25% Of iTunes users are listening to U2 ?

A staggering statistic to be sure. No offense to U2, but we wondered if we were that out of touch with pop music. After some very simple review we found the problem is this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact it’s misleading, inaccurate, and deceptive.

In this study it was revealed that more iPhone users listen to U2 (23%) than Taylor Swift (2nd on the list at 11%) and Katy Perry (3rd on the list at 8%) COMBINED! Are warning bells going off for any of you?

The issue we have with this study starts here:

As part of the release of Apple’s iPhone 6 and Apple Watch, U2’s album Songs of Innocence was automatically added to every iTunes account in the world. How many iTunes accounts are there? It’s a tough number to find, but the total sales of iPad as of late 2014: 225 million and iPhone as of March 2015: 700 million.

Here’s another whopper, 95% of iTunes users listened to one or more of the tracks from the album! Again, let’s remember, the album was automatically uploaded to every single iTunes account in the world without notification or user permission. As of 2012, the average iTunes library consisted of 7,160 songs. Do you think there is any chance that users may have clicked the song wondering how it got there? Maybe while listening to their library on shuffle one of the songs was auto selected at some point before A) they knew it was on their phone and B) because initially Apple made it near impossible to delete from libraries it remained there for some period of time?

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“This is fantastic news. If these figures suggest that these songs still matter to people, then we’re knocked out…” — Bono (lead singer of U2)

Sorry Bono, all that these figures suggest is horribly flawed findings. Because the company behind the research didn’t dig deeper we’ll never know real results. However, it’s ridiculous to go in to this study knowing that the album was automatically uploaded to all iTunes accounts and not ask the respondents broader questions. Asking users if they actually chose to listen to a song by U2 would be one elementary way of getting to the real statistics. Two other simple questions: Did you know it was on your phone? Do you know how to delete the album?

If it seems like we’re a little upset about this study it’s because we are. We take the decisions our clients make from our findings very seriously. Problems arise when organizations (or in this case a band) find a statistic that is favorable to them and they decide not to dig any deeper. Big Buck Research & Analytics prides itself on seeing the whole picture and not accepting results at face value. We know businesses can’t afford to make decisions based off of flawed logic so we provide them real recommendations based off of the complete truth.

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