U2’s Bono has been talking (again) about the ‘Songs of Innocence’ album giveaway with Apple, in an interview with Irish radio station 2FM. The chat included some updated stats: the album has now been downloaded by 77m people, while iTunes itself now has 885m registered accounts – up from the 800m figure announced by Apple earlier this year. “We’re going to help them get that number to a billion,” said Bono, who also parried criticism of the album being pushed onto people’s devices. “I can say to them, no one has deleted more U2 songs in the last 5 years than the four members of U2.” Bono also talks about the much-discussed “new format” U2 is working on with Apple, which still has the ring of an app, or iTunes LP reworked for iOS devices. But perhaps most interesting is his strong backing for… Spotify? Regarding those billion potential iTunes users: “If one tenth of those people were to be part of a subscription service like Spotify has, and I’m a huge Spotify fan, at $10 a month… Do the math. That’s a billion a month. That’s $12 billion dollars. That’s bigger than the entire music business coming out of one company. Even if it was 5%, now musicians are suddenly in a game that people are ready to pay for, their lives are changed.”
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In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…