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'Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously' (vellumatlanta.com)
Vellum's James has written about his ordeal with Apple Music which many people can relate to. Apple Music, the Cupertino-based giant's online music streaming service, deleted 122GB of music files that James had stored on his computer. He writes: What Amber (supposed Apple Support representative) explained was exactly what I'd feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users' computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple's database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn't recognize -- which came up often, since I'm a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself -- it would then download it to Apple's database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted. This isn't the first time Apple Music has deleted a user's locally stored music files. Long-time Apple watcher Jim Dalrymple canceled his subscription last year and called Apple Music a "nightmare" after the service allegedly deleted over 4,700 of his previously bought songs. At the time, he wrote: At some point, enough is enough. That time has come for me -- Apple Music is just too much of a hassle to be bothered with. Nobody I've spoken at Apple or outside the company has any idea how to fix it, so the chances of a positive outcome seem slim to none.Incidentally, Apple Music is rumoured for a reboot at the company's developer conference in June. It's not clear if fixing the aforementioned glitch is among Apple's imminent agenda.
That is how iCloud music library works. It uploads your files and stores them. If there is a match, you can download a high quality version. If not, it stores your original version. You can download your music at any time, permanently. Nothing has been deleted or 'stolen'.
Did you actually RTFA? He *couldn't* download a copy of rare alternate versions he had; those are gone, replaced with the standard version of tracks, because the band and song names are the same. Nor could he download his own music, the music he wrote and performed and recorded himself, in the full WAV 16 bit/44.1k form he had it in -- only in a lossy format, because Apple converted the WAVs to a lossy format and threw them away.