Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously

[Deleted]

Source: https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/...-no-seriously/

How has Apple avoided a class action lawsuit on this issue?

“The software is functioning as intended,” said Amber.
“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?”
“Yes,” she replied.

I had just explained to Amber that 122 GB of music files were missing from my laptop. ... 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.

This led to four immediate problems:

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.

Of course, there are more issues than this. Apple has faced widespread complaints regarding Apple Music displaying incorrect album art, mangling file information, and Apple “geniuses” being ill-informed on the subject, thus unable to offer working solutions.

If you’re wondering why Apple hasn’t been sued yet, it’s because the iTunes Terms of Use vaguely warn of this issue, then later indemnify Apple and preclude any litigation from users who’ve been boned:

“iCloud Music Library is turned on automatically when you set up your Apple Music Subscription…When your Apple Music Subscription term ends, you will lose access to any songs stored in your iCloud Music Library.

I recovered my original music files only by using a backup I made weeks earlier. Many people don’t back up as often as they should, though, so this isn’t always an option. Amber relayed to me that she’s had to suffer through many calls from people who cancelled their Apple Music subscription after the free, three-month trial, only to discover that all of their own music files had been deleted and there was no way to get them back.

So my files were temporarily restored; but the only way to prevent this from happening over and over, according to Amber, was to cancel my subscription to Apple Music (which she herself doesn’t use due to the above-listed reasons) and to make sure my iCloud settings did not include storing any music backups.

For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

When giving the above warning, however, even in my most Orwellian paranoia I never could have dreamed that the content holders, like Apple, would also reach into your computer and take away what you already owned. If Taxi Driver is on Netflix, Netflix doesn’t come to your house and steal your Taxi Driver DVD. But that’s where we’re headed. When it comes to music, Apple is already there.

Audacious. Egregious. Crazy. These are just some of the adjectives I used in my conversation with Amber. She actually asked me how I wanted to move forward, putting the onus of a solution back on me. I understand why, too: she’s just as powerless as I am. I would love for Apple to face public backlash and financial ramifications for having taken advantage of its customers in such a brazen and unethical way, but Apple seems beyond reproach at this point. It took three representatives before I could even speak to someone who comprehended what I was saying, and even when she admitted to Apple’s shady practice, she was able to offer no solution besides “don’t use the product.” When our data is finally a full-blown utility, however, “just don’t use the product” will cease to be an option. Apple will be in control, bringing their 1984 commercial full circle into a tragic, oppressive irony.

[Super Friendly Kitty Cat]

Why would anyone use Apple products in the first place?

Zero sympathy given.

[Endus]

Is it egregious and awful? Sure. Is it also laid out in the TOS? Yes. This is people shooting themselves in the foot by not realising what the service they're buying into is.

[BuckSparkles]

Why would anyone use Apple products in the first place?

Zero sympathy given.

Agreed.

I like apple for business.

For pleasure? Why would anybody use apple products.

[breadisfunny]

this is why you rip cd's.

[Serpha]

Serves you right for using that Apple and Microsoft.
"Ohh, but Apple makes shiny products, they work better than M$ and Android....ohhh wait"

[Hydrofluoric]

Why would anyone use Apple products in the first place?

Zero sympathy given.

I have an Ipod because I like the capabilities, layout, great power saving (can be left on for a week before dying), and it provides a ton more storage than my phone (Motorlla Droid, unable to upgrade storage), 16G vs 32G.

I see nothing wrong with Ipods or even Itunes for what I use them for. Although I'm a dirty bootlegger and don't have an Apple Music sub.

[Gib Lover]

I've been reading up on this since it was posted, and the bit about deleting the music is more than likely exaggerated. Almost no one online has had the same thing happen, and the few that said that it has happened provide no proof(I know, it's hard to prove this sort of thing but still).
The downloading different versions of your songs is 100% on point though, anyone that has used this service with a non-standard version of a song can attest to that.

[Endus]

this is why you rip cd's.

Read the article. The service scans your entire hard drive, uploads all music files into your iCloud, then deletes them off your HD. Doesn't matter if they were ripped from CD, or in the case of the author, original works that you created yourself.

[Sykol]

Ew, Apple. Have they started calling their consumers iDiots yet?

[klogaroth]

How does Apple Music interact with older games that have sound files on the hard drive as .wav or similar? Does it delete those as well?

[Gib Lover]

How does Apple music interact with older games that have sound files on the hard drive as .wav or similar? Does it delete those as well?

Your shit isn't getting deleted. The blogposter is either exaggerating, lying, or experienced an incredibly freaky bug. Will that .wav be replaced with a different version of the file that Apple has on record? Possibly, and that would really suck.

Basically, Apple IS terrible, but there would be much more widespread panic if people were suddenly missing hundreds of gigs of music.
Your rare live/demo shit CAN be replaced with a studio version and in a lot of cases downgraded from 320 to 256 kbps, which is more than enough reason for me to never go near this service.

[ro9ue]

Apple Music as a service is fucking idiotic.

[AeneasBK]

*shrug* I used Itunes about 6 times. No problems. Tried to by the original Axel F, Beverly Hills Cop theme song. Gave me something that sounded like it had been put together by a 13 year old having a play about on Cubase. Fuck Apple.

[Yunru]

Read the article. The service scans your entire hard drive, uploads all music files into your iCloud, then deletes them off your HD. Doesn't matter if they were ripped from CD, or in the case of the author, original works that you created yourself.

Sounds more like a virus to me.

Ugh..if my 40 giga of music were deleted like that i would rage. (i even have a backup on a movable HD in a case of a dying hard disk)

[-aiko-]

Yikes. Who in their right mind would ever subscribe to that service? That is the dumbest system I've ever heard of.

[Ishayu]

I've been reading up on this since it was posted, and the bit about deleting the music is more than likely exaggerated. Almost no one online has had the same thing happen, and the few that said that it has happened provide no proof(I know, it's hard to prove this sort of thing but still).
The downloading different versions of your songs is 100% on point though, anyone that has used this service with a non-standard version of a song can attest to that.

indeed. I have a MacBook Pro from 2011 that I still use regularly. In light of these news, I actually went and checked my laptop.

Not only has not a single music file been deleted from my Logic Pro folder or anywhere else on the file system even though I have a paid subscription to both to Apple Music and iCloud (50GB), but I've even got multiple backups of them due to Time Machine. The music I add to iTunes are still in their folder just as they were before I started using Apple Music. Nothing has changed.

On top of this, only music that I have dragged into iTunes or iCloud is in the cloud AND I had to explicitly tell the computer to integrate iCloud, and then I had to explicitly also tell iCloud to upload my music.

I do, however, have the OPTION to detect duplicate songs and delete one or the other. That's an option inside iTunes. If I delete the wrong one - well there's only the one on Apple Music left. It's definitely a problem with this view that you can't easily see which is your own and which is from Apple Music, but on the other hand I still had to click on the file and tap Cmd+backspace to remove it, so yeah.

Whoever had this happen to them probably did something they shouldn't have done. Not only is Apple incredibly explicit about asking you every time you share something with them, but they have a ton of features to ensure files don't go missing from your library, including migrations and back-ups and whatnot.

And here's a common-sense argument for why Apple definitely hasn't done this: Programs on OS X are normally dropped into Applications, but you don't have to. Programs and applications can read files outside their .app folder and may depend on music files, and these music files could be anywhere, and the app itself can be anywhere. Furthermore, you don't install apps in OS X. The Application folder is just some place people normally put apps, but you can put them anywhere. There is also no central repository for where the apps are; they are just folders and you can put them anywhere. OS X, Rhapsody, and NeXT all worked like this since like 1986.

If this is true, we should experience A TON of programs that suddenly stopped working and A LOT of angry Mac users in general; but we don't.

[melodramocracy]

Buy discs, and you won't have this problem.

[Super Kami Dende]

I would have sympathy for him if it happened on any other software other than Apple.

They have literally be fucking people over with Itunes for years, WHY are people still allowing them to.

People need to just stop buying into Apples bullshit "user-friendly" OS's

[THEORACLE64]

Apple Music as a service is fucking idiotic.

Never had an ounce of problem with it myself. I have plenty of my own productions in iTunes, and Apple Music has never deleted them. They become uploaded to your iCloud Drive, but they never get deleted in that process. And actually, if something is accidentally deleted you can re-download it in a second.