All ethics of the deletion aside, matching on metadata is a weird, crappy approach (and that itself is pretty consistent with my other experiences with iTunes).

It shouldn't be hard to imagine that metadata will have collisions, and include something like a hash of the actual data.

Someone should make a tool that creates mp3s having the metadata of other real songs for apple to match on.

There already is... https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Apparently Amazon uses this tagging service to keep its online music library organized.

what the parent poster meant was crafting audio files and metadata that would match what apple checks against ones, such as to get free music

Clever.

I don't know if it's intentional filling in for songs they couldn't license or metadata matching gone wrong, but occasionally on Spotify a song on an old album is replaced with an inferior remix from a newer album.

Intentionally or not, history (what songs actually were on an album) gets edited unless you manage music files yourself.

(The Apple behavior described in the article is way worse than what Spotify does, of course.)

ITunes will rename albums and artists and songs and give the wrong album or cover or strip the album cover because they don't sell it, Apple doesn't care about your collection, they want to curate it their way for their benefit.

Thanks for the confirmation. I've been weighing my options between Apple Music and Spotify Premium and that makes up my mind. iTunes is enough of a pain in the ass without worrying about whether it'll delete my music collection.

The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.

Go try Google Music. You get non-destructive music sync (10,000 songs or something?) and a massive library. Plus, the curated stations are all the old Songza content that was pretty awesome. $10/mo

And you get Youtube without ads for the same price.

Their curated playlists are seriously top-notch. I've found so many new bands through the Blogged 50 and Gorilla vs. Bear playlists.

Plus, Google Play Music's UI blows the others out of the water. My favorite part is the "Play Next" and "Add to Queue" choices for unobtrusively adding songs to what's currently playing. Something that iTunes actually used to have, but then they removed it for no reason.

The best part of the deal must be no ads on YouTube though. I am not competent enough to block all of them on mobile even when rooted with adaway.

I think it is $15 for five people.

If you're still curious, Firefox for android has full support for all of the desktop extensions, including uBlock.

I'm very surprised that they would perform such a destructive operation based only off of metadata (instead of some sort of audio fingerprinting).

I was under the impression they did do audio fingerprinting. Otherwise, you could gain access to a ton of music.

Sort of ironically, the older iTunes Match system did audio fingerprinting, but Apple Music does not. I have gotten some very weird new metadata occasionally since the switch.

For the record, I've never lost any music, and I'm not entirely sure how that's possible short of a catastrophic iTunes bug[1] -- I'm not disputing anyone's stories, but even "post-Cloud" I've never seen iTunes delete files without me actually clicking on delete somewhere. Despite what the blogger was told by the rep, I'm pretty sure that's not how Apple Music is supposed to work. You enable it on a "primary" Mac, it matches tracks to the iTunes Store library, and then it uploads tracks that aren't in that library to iCloud. The files in your original library will be left alone unless you delete the original files.

[1]: Not that "catastrophic iTunes bug" sounds unlikely. I've heard friend-of-a-friend stories about deletion bugs in the recent past.

Even if they do audio fingerprinting the match is simplistic. I have a large collection of different versions of songs, and Shazam identifies them all as the studio version.

Audio fingerprinting is also pretty hit and miss for classical music where the work is the same and the artist differs.