10 Biggest Album Flops In Rock History
1. Songs of Innocence - U2
U2 have always had an heir of self-importance about themselves ever since they hit the top of the charts. For every great record like The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby that these Irish rockers made, the more pretentious behavior that came with projects like Rattle and Hum turned some fans off just the same. This kind of thing normally faded away as long as the music kicked ass, but there is a way of promoting your album into oblivion.
When presenting their new album Songs of Innocence, Bono and co. were planning on releasing the album online, which would make sense considering the unorthodox ways that everyone from Radiohead to Bjork were releasing their material doing at the time. However, when the band paired with Apple to launch the album onto everybody's phones, the average music listener was absolutely ravenous.
It's one thing to just get the album for free from the band, but to have an album literally force fed into your music library was too much to bear, leading fans to request that the album be deleted from their library immediately. Songs of Innocence may be a good record on the surface, but U2 ended forgetting the biggest rule of music marketing...balance. The worst album bombs aren't the albums that no one knows about...it's the album that the record company won't stop telling you about.