I genuinely don't really get the scale of the annoyance over this. I also think that all the "Blah blah U2.com sucks" stuff is a bit silly now that they've given us two extremely good fan club gifts in a row.
Yes, they hyped what turned out to be not much. That's their job! They want people to keep interested even if it is for things like remixes. At no point did they ever even so much as hint that it would be new material. There is absolutely zero evidence anywhere in U2's history for the idea that they would have released a hint of new material now. And that's not because U2.com is particularly bad or anything, it's just that there are virtually no bands of U2's stature who would release news about new material via a subscribers-only clip or audio, particularly since it would make it to non-subscribers 2 seconds later anyway and thus be pointless.
And it's not like this was hard to work out; within the first page of this thread people were already predicting it would be this! Yes, U2.com have been rubbish in the past. They have also genuinely improved and are now in their second consecutive year of releasing what is really quite a good fan club special, certainly better than most bands' fan clubs and many of them are comparable prices. (Most tend to just give you a t-shirt and poster or some such crap) This was a moderate level of hype for something a bit crap but which we could all have predicted, and which none of us had any remote reason to believe would be all that much better.
Basically, I can understand people being a bit irritated at it. But I can't really understand people acting as though this is a major scandal.
