Bono on album stunt: 'We got carried away with ourselves'

U2 frontman Bono has apologized to Apple users who weren't keen to automatically receive their new album, confessing the band "might have gotten carried away" with the idea of doling out a free record.

The Beautiful Day hitmakers caused widespread controversy last month (Sep14) when Songs of Innocence was released exclusively through iTunes and installed into nearly 500 million users' music libraries automatically.

On Tuesday (14Oct14) the Irish rockers sat down to answer questions from fans on Facebook.com to celebrate the physical release of the album, but not all who participated in the chat were happy with the way U2 decided to debut the record.

During the interview, a fan wrote in, "Can you please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people's playlists ever again? It's really rude."

Bono replied with a deep sigh, and said, "Oops... I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea... might have gotten carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard.

"There's a lot of noise out there. I guess, we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it."