Apple Music steals your music

Quote by James Pinkstone
1. If Apple serves me my music, that means that when I don’t have wifi access, I can’t listen to it. When I say “my music,” I don’t just mean the music that, over twenty years (since before iTunes existed), I painstakingly imported from thousands of CDs and saved to my computer’s internal hard drive. I also mean original music that I recorded and saved to my computer. Apple and wifi access now decide if I can hear it, and where, and when.

2. What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do. Said alternate versions will be replaced by the most mainstream version, despite their original, at-one-time correct, titles, labels, and file contents.

3. Although I could click the little cloud icon next to each song title and “get it back” from Apple, their servers aren’t fast enough to make it an easy task. It would take around thirty hours to get my music back. And even then…

4. Should I choose to reclaim my songs via download, the files I would get back would not necessarily be the same as my original files. As a freelance composer, I save WAV files of my own compositions rather than Mp3s. WAV files have about ten times the number of samples, so they just sound better. Since Apple Music does not support WAV files, as they stole my compositions and stored them in their servers, they also converted them to Mp3s or AACs. So not only do I need to keep paying Apple Music just to access my own files, but I have to hear an inferior version of each recording instead of the one I created.

love Apple's hardware, but it's because of this complete disrespect for their customers that I don't see me ever using iTunes, iCloud or any other of their services. It's truly despicable!

Quote by seeker4
I am not, and never have been, an Apple fan and this does not surprise me in the least. Jobs was brilliant, no doubt of that, but Apple, who once taunted IBM with "1984" ads, has now become Big Brother themselves.

Quote by puddleduck


But again, what evidence do you have that Apple is 'Big Brother'? It's far better than most. Apple has a lot of faults (being fucking expensive is top of my list), but accusing Apple of being Big Brother is odd.

Quote by puddleduck
Well it might be despicable if it were true. But it isn't. Apple Music has never removed or replaced music on your Mac.

It's technology that's to blame. If the world relied on typewriters and vinyl records it would be dizzingly wonderful.

Quote by BiMale73


Technology come's in various forms. Technology made with good intentions and respect for the user's freedom, privacy, security, etc. in mind and technology that's made with bad intentions and disrespect for those issues. In this case it's technology that shows a total disrespect for the user's freedom and ownership of their own music and it's made by Apple.
Whether Microsoft of Google are better, just as bad or worse doesn't matter.

Quote by puddleduck
I'm not arguing about Microsoft or Google when it comes to music.

Quote by puddleduck
I was making the point to the OP that Apple Music does not remove your music. Or replace it. So it's got nothing to do with freedom (if you have existing MP3 files Apple Music should leave them intact) or bad intentions (actually Apple Music just tries to be clever).

There's a good write up of it here.

In short, it may just come down to shitty software. My argument is that if you rely on technology, shit is going to happen eventually.