Did Apple Music Steal Your Music Files Too?

dgstorm · May 9, 2016

A tech blogger named James Pinkstone @VellumAtlanta.com recently recounted a terrifying horror story regarding his music files being effectively stolen from his computer by Apple Music itself. Specifically, Pinkstone claims that Apple Music stored the music files in the iCloud and then deleted them from his desktop's physical hard drive without his permission. What makes this story even more gut-wrenching is that he supposedly contacted an Apple tech support person named Amber, and she confirmed that this was exactly what an Apple Music subscription does.

Here's a quote with a few more details,

"What Amber 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."

Needless to say, the blogger was irate about this situation, since he supposedly had 120GBs of music collected over many years, and now it was being held hostage by his Apple Music subscription. He indicated that he was able to resolve the situation without any help from Apple because he had backed up his music collection recently.

After doing some investigation, we could not duplicate this issue. However, we were able to see that the music a person syncs up on their iPhone through an Apple Music subscription does not exactly correspond to the music they stored on their hard drive. It turns out that an Apple Music subscription will try and find the closest possible song to what you have, so if your physical version is a special "live" version of the song, the one that plays on your iPhone will probably be a radio edit instead.

Ultimately, we aren't too sure if this blogger really experienced this issue or not. It could have been human or computer error that he missed. Still, this was such a terrible experience, we thought it would be worth sharing and asking our members to check out. Can any of you folks who have an Apple Music subscription confirm his story?