iTunes Match and Apple Music

Hi,

With iTunes Match, you will retain downloaded mactched tracks when you cancel your iTunes Match subscription. Apple Music includes iTunes Match features. You should retain your downloaded tracks that you own after Apple Music subscription expires. You will lose access to Apple Music downloads.

As always, You should keep a backup of your music on an external drive.

Jim

From Subscribe to iTunes Match - Apple Support:

If you have an Apple Music membership, you get all of the benefits of iTunes Match, plus access to the entire Apple Music catalog. You can also get a Family Membership to share the catalog with your family members. Learn more about joining Apple Music.

As a current Apple Music and former iTunes Match subscriber I can confirm that this is the case. Yes, they are separate services. You won't see a free iTunes Match subscription in your account if you have Apple Music, but there is no practical benefit to purchasing both services at the same time, you would be wasting your money.

iTunes and Apple Music provide you access to your past purchases with the iTunes Store, allowing you to stream that content or download it on demand. iTunes Match extends that by allowing non-purchased content to be matched or uploaded after which it can be treated in the same way. Apple Music further extends what you can do over iTunes Match by allowing you to select content from the Apple Music catalog and add it to your library while your subscription remains active.

tt2

Thank you so much for the quick reply.

I am the same, Music subscriber and former Match subscriber; but then I learned that not all music is matched so I re-subscribed. This is was Apple Support told me via email:

"Apple Music and iTunes Match both give “iCloud/Sync Music Library" which can be populated in one of three ways: with music matched from your original local music collection, with music uploaded from your collection, if iTunes cannot find a match and if you have Apple Music, with music from the Apple Music library. Apple Music alone contains all the functionality of iTunes Match with the only difference being the way that DRM is applied.

With iTunes Match, all music added to your library either via matching or upload is DRM free. Uploaded files can be downloaded on other devices in their original format and matched songs in DRM free 256kbps AAC.

With Apple Music, any uploaded files remain in their original DRM free form but any matched songs, or music added from the Apple Music library, can only be downloaded on other devices with DRM and will only work while you have a subscription.

Finally, iTunes Match can still complement your Apple Music subscription because if you have both you will get your matched music DRM free though it should go without saying that Apple Music content will still have DRM even with a Match subscription."

How do you interpret this? I am still confused.

AlphaGerman wrote:

With Apple Music, any uploaded files remain in their original DRM free form but any matched songs, or music added from the Apple Music library, can only be downloaded on other devices with DRM and will only work while you have a subscription.

I believe this bit of the statement is wrong, although it wasn't in the early days of Apple Music. Matched content should now download DRM-free. This quote from the iCloud matching technology controversy section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music should indicate when that change took place:

 In July 2016, Apple switched the matching technology to incorporate features identical to iTunes Match, specifically the use of "audio fingerprints" to scan sound data. The new technology also removed DRM from downloaded matched songs.

Regardless of which services you use I would always recommend you maintain a full backup of your library. I also recommend manually copying the entire library from one computer to another when you want to migrate the library rather than relying on the cloud to ensure that you have all the parts of the library not captured in iCloud Music Library, and have your original content rather than any potential mismatches.

tt2

Apple Support via email told me that iTunes Match is NOT included in Apple Music. They are two different services that do not compliment each other and do entirely different things.