I just had an issue with Spotify where they couldn't take payment for some reason and I could no longer find any trace of my "family plan" members. Each user was presented with a link to get premium. I used the same card to get a family plan again, then each user has to be added again. This can't be something they have done without considering the user experience.

I had to pause my subscription for a few months for personal reasons and my collection is gone too.

This is crazy. Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.

Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.

At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.

One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.

Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.

You missed two months of payment and you are angry that a company closed the account? Boy do I have to tell you a story about what you can lose by not paying your AWS bill for two months… I am curious how you handle customers that do not pay and continue to not pay instead of just ending their subscription.

I stopped paying for Spotify for 3 years, didn’t login for 2 of those years, came back and my playlists were all still there.

My annual Apple Music subscription lapsed for one day, and my entire library was gone the next day when I resubscribed for another year.

Apple are allowed to make whatever customer hostile choices they want. As a former Apple Music customer, I’m not making that mistake again.

AWS has to pay a relatively big money for keeping user data. It is understandable why they would want to delete it.

Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.

What do you lose if you don’t pay to AWS for two months?

My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.

In many places I worked we would keep a user's history on the app for a long while in case they decided to resubscribe. It doesn't cost much to have a 6-12 months leeway before complete deletion.

Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.

I don't understand why AM doesn't use iCloud to store playlists. You have the storage anyway and a good chunk of people pay for an additional increase too.