Canceling apple music subscription and loosing my music

If you cancel your Apple Music subscription, you will lose access to "offline listening" tracks that you downloaded from the Apple Music service. I believe you will also lose related play lists.

You should be able to keep all of your purchased music, whether imported from your own CDs, purchased online from the iTunes Store, or purchased online from some other Internet store. I emphasize should.

My understanding is that the most likely complication – in the absence of outright bugs – would have to do with iTunes Match / Sync Library / iCloud Music Library. Or whatever Apple may be calling the syncing and matching services these days.

https://www.theverge.com/23288976/icloud-turn-off-apple-music-how-to

One issue is whether the system might incorrectly "match" one of your songs to a different version of the same song, and overwrite the original. It's also not entirely clear to me if there might be circumstances under which a purchased song might be "matched" to, and overwritten by, a DRMed one that would { go away or stop playing } when the Apple Music subscription ended.

As for iTunes-based synchronization or Finder-based synchronization completely overwriting the music library in your iPhone – that's the way the system is designed to operate.

The original iPod synchronization model was one-way: from the iTunes Library on a "master" Mac or PC, to the hidden library on the iPod. Once Apple started selling music to iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch users through iTunes Store apps on those devices themselves, I believe there was a modification to let songs purchased that way go back into the library of the "master" Mac or PC. But that was the exception that proved the rule.

Basically, what this meant is that you needed to guard (back up) the iTunes Library on the "master" Mac or PC; since as long as you had that, you could easily load a new iPod or iPhone with your favorite songs. The reverse was not true. If you had an iPod or iPhone, you could not copy the music back to a Mac or PC. This, no doubt, pleased the recording industry.

With music that you purchase from the iTunes Store, if you remove a download from your device, you might be offered the chance to download it again. But iTunes/Finder synchronization is how you get music from your own CDs onto an iPhone (assuming that you're not playing around with third-party iPhone management utilities).

Canceling your Apple Music subscription should not delete music that you purchased through the iTunes Store or music that you imported from your own CDs.

That is, if you did not turn on the iTunes-Match-like feature to match your purchased music against Apple's library and synchronize songs across devices. I don't know if that might have matched files and triggered the downloads of files that had DRM on them (either to other devices, or to the original device).

But if you want to be safe, make a backup or two of your music library before subscribing to Apple Music. Store those backups some place safe in case "the worst" happens and you need them.

Unfortunately, having paid for the Apple Music subscription and canceling it two times in my life, it does NOT maintain your previous library in a usable fashion. It blocks you out of almost everything (I have 40gb of music prior to AM, and NONE of it is recognized.)

I have tried syncing, re-syncing, removing, adding and ALL the other options ad nauseam. The only way to make it work is to factory wipe the phone and restore from a backup (which you hopefully made before buying the subscription).

I'm seriously rethinking Apple products for this reason alone. The music I had before was from HUNDREDS of CD's (what are those?!) and I'm not going to sit around for countless hours to re-rip them all. Apple, get your stuff together with this. Stop hijacking my property!