U2’s last big moment revolved around the launch of No Line on the Horizon in February 2009, followed by the two-year, three-leg, completely sold-out 360° tour. By the time it was over, in July 2011, 7.1 million tickets had been purchased totaling $737 million, making U2 360° the highest-grossing tour in history.
It was a massive, gargantuan success (and the shows were transcendent), but No Line on the Horizon, a highly acclaimed album that ranks among U2’s very best, sold 5 million copies-a disappointment only in the context of U2’s huge sales before the music-business implosion. One of the many self-frightening things Bono has said to make his job more difficult is that “to be relevant is a lot harder than to be successful.” And U2 still craves relevance and shudders at the thought of “turning into a jukebox,” as Mullen once said.
“We don’t want to ever be a heritage act,” Edge says. “It might happen, but we’ll go kicking and screaming into that mode. We feel the place for us to be is part of the conversation of contemporary culture and music and film and everything else, and we don’t see the reason why we can’t, because it’s been possible for various artists in different forms. Frank Lloyd Wright, to the day he died, was designing the most incredible things-we want to be part of that rather than grow old gracefully.”
Looking at U2 in terms of discography and ticket and album sales is, in some ways, to look in the wrong direction as the band gears up to reconquer itself and the world one more time. One of pop music’s great business stories is how U2 never let itself get screwed by the record industry, retained ownership of its publishing and master tapes, mounted one technologically unprecedented tour spectacular after another, built a global fan base and now negotiates with the biggest companies in entertainment and technology as a peer, not a supplicant.