Why being charged for Music I uploaded into iTunes

Years ago, I burned (uploaded) all of my CDs into iTunes. Shortly thereafter I was informed by Apple that in order for me to listen to all of the albums/CDs that I uploaded I had to pay for Apple Music. Here I am years later still paying $15 a month for Apple Music just to listen to my own music. After being in a zoom call today, I was informed that I should not be paying to listen to my own music. That in fact, all the albums I put into iTunes, I can listen to free. Can someone please confirm that I’ve been getting charged for years and shouldn’t have been.

Posted on Nov 30, 2023 11:01 PM

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5 replies

Dec 2, 2023 04:17 AM in response to coloradosherri

You don't need to pay for Apple Music, or iTunes Match, to listen to music from your own CDs. You just need to do iTunes-based or Music/Finder-based synchronization from a Mac or PC.


You do need to pay for Apple Music or iTunes Match if you want Apple to "match" the music from your CDs against their library, and download copies of songs from their library to your (other) devices. When iTunes Match came out, Apple sold that as a way of upgrading your songs to 256 Kbps AAC quality. But sometimes iTunes Match will make bad matches and overwrite songs with different versions, maybe even entirely different songs.


If you use the Sync Library feature of Apple Music, I believe it will put DRM on tracks it downloads … and those will stop working when you stop subscribing to Apple Music.


The source of the confusion here may be the word "uploaded". If you told Apple that you wanted to "upload" songs they may have thought that you were talking about matching your songs against the ones on their servers, and then uploading any for which there was no match.


The term for pulling music from a CD into an iTunes or Music library is "importing."

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Why being charged for Music I uploaded into iTunes

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