Apple Music has had a pretty rough first year. Despite gaining millions of subscribers and setting download records with some of its more high-profile releases, users still have plenty to stop them from quite clicking on that heart next to the service.
And that’s not just because nobody’s really sure what the hell Apple Music hearts do.
But one man has had such a bad experience that the Apple Support representative he spoke to gave him some advice that was almost certainly not in her training. And he’s shared his story online to warn others away from what has happened to him.
James Pinkstone, director of design service Vellum, has a terrifying post on the company blog this week claiming that Apple Music stole his files.
It didn’t lose them, he says. They aren’t misplaced; Apple basically reached into his computer, uploaded his music to its own servers, and then deleted them all from his hard drive on its way out. And it’s no small amount, either. Pinkstone says Apple Music cleared 122GB of stuff from his laptop, and it wasn’t just his purchased tunes.
“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,” Pinkstone writes. “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.”
That’s right: Apple Music confiscated original music and deleted the originals, Pinkstone says.
And all this is bad enough, but after some frustration in the Apple forums and several calls to the support team, all he got was an assurance from an Apple Support rep that “The software is functioning as intended,” and her advice that the best (or only) way to avoid this problem was to not subscribe to Apple Music. Again, this is coming from an Apple employee.
Subscribers have had issues like this since the beginning of the service last June. Users quickly began to suspect that Apple Music was replacing their own tunes with copyright-protected ones. They also noticed that the platform was showing incorrect album art or misplacing songs.
The culprit in both instances, as appears to be true in Pinkstone’s case, is the iCloud Music Library feature, which syncs up your files so that you can stream them from any device you own with the setting enabled on it. Pinkstone’s claim that Music Library was deleting his files after syncing up is troubling, however, but it seems that backing up and keeping the feature off might save you some heartache.
Or, you could take the support rep’s advice and just not use Apple Music at all, but we may be too far along for that.
Evan Killham is a freelance writer who lives in Nebraska and isn’t interested in football, so he has plenty of time to play and think about video games. He has written for Bitmob and GamesBeat and sometimes, he even goes outside. But not too often because he’s heard there are bees out there. Occasionally, companies send free units for review. Evan subscribes to Cult of Mac’s Reviews Policy and also does not keep the items he receives for possible coverage.
5 responses to “Another Apple Music horror story (and how to avoid the curse)”
He’s right. Apple removes your files from your local storage. It’s just plain STUPID to use their cloud feature for your music. When you lack internet connectivity, you will not have access to your music. If you end your account, your music is gone unless you have downloaded it again.
Apple Radio and Apple Music are terrible apps for most consumers, and there’s no rationale for their model. None.
PS: I am a 100% Apple user, with not one non-Apple computer, phone, or router in my household. I just can’t believe how wrong Apple’s approach to music is. There’s almost no support for classical music lovers. There’s no support for anyone whose not online 24/7. It’s dumb.
This is surely something you guys can look into and discuss an alternative solution. Could someone at Cult of Mac not look into running their own music cloud say through WD My Cloud and see how it performs through IOS devices. I’m about to cancel Apple Music, not because they’ve taken my collection but because I’m not going to pay them thousands of dollars over 20 years and own nothing.
It’s going to be a period of pain for my family BUT an important lesson for my 17 year old daughter who expects any music she wants to hear on demand but never buys anything, doesn’t pay for the subscription, just expects her music to be on tap. For me it doesn’t work like that you have to earn it, music isn’t disposable commodity that these music streaming services have reduced it to.
& of course we now all know that even the music you’ve bought from Apple you still don’t own it!!!
Like Jamie Pinkstone I have plenty of my own compositions and recording on my PC. We have an Apple Music family membership and use iCloud Music Library but this hasn’t happened to me (my own music is still there in studio-quality wav format) because we do NOT use iTunes Match. That is the culprit, not iCloud Music Library. After reading the description of iCloud Match I was amazed that anyone would sign up for it, to be honest.
Technically in this case Apple is guilty of Piracy because it downloaded music without legal permission. Even if they promised not to share it, that is no different from any pirate – with the exception that in this case the pirate is breaking into the computer of the original composer to do it. A felony.
An End User License Agreement does not make a company immune to DMCA complaints or lawsuits filed under DMCA rules, and courts have in the past ruled aspects of contracts unenforceable. I have never met a Doctor who didn’t require the patients to waive the right to sue, and yet somehow that never stopped a malpractice suit. There is only so much a company can get away with before it is forced to face consequences.
I can’t help but think this is attributable to a library setting. I have thousands of songs on my local drive and have Match turned on. There are settings to consolidate, etc, which I’ve played with. I had music files on my laptop and my NAS drive. I wanted the music off my MBA’s limited space HD, and this automatically copied/removed from my local MBA drive to my 3Tb NAS. Again, with Match turned on. I have a mixture of iTunes bought music, locally ripped music (from my ancient iMac which has this archaic thing called a CD-ROM drive, in which I inserted a bright shiny plastic disk called a “CD”) and other sources. All still there.
I am one or two versions behind on iTunes application software, though. I hate how they keep changing the interface so I’ve learned to say no when it asks to upgrade.