Sharon Osbourne is mad at U2, and it’s not because she doesn’t want to see the movie that Bono is writing. Instead, she lashed out at the band over their privacy-invading tactic of sneaking their new album into everyone’s iTunes library for free. (This was, of course, prior to them walking it back.)
Flexing her typing fingers to prepare for inflammatory language the likes of which the Internet had never seen, Osbourne took to Twitter to bash Bono, The Edge, and the two other guys with normal-person names. “U2 you are business moguls not musicians anymore. No wonder you have to give your mediocre music away for free cause no one wants to buy it,” she tweeted, no doubt high-fiving herself for the sick burn. The digital beatdown continued as Osbourne noted: “Guys nothing is free, how much you making? PS, btw you are just a bunch of middle age political groupies….” before slamming a Surge and waiting for the shockwaves to reverberate across the World Wide Web.
The next day, Osbourne explained her actions on her show The Talk, presumably while in the throes of a wicked Surge hangover. She said she was angry U2 had “set a precedent that music is disposable, it’s just another piece of software and it’s nothing, you should give it away for free.” She then argued that “There’s a whole new breed of artists coming up that need that money to survive to be able to continue to create. We’re not all billionaires, we’re not all in your world,” which is a very sensible point coming from someone who only has hundreds of millions of dollars.