How to remove uploaded music from the cloud

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Level 3

929 points

How to remove uploaded music from the cloud

My son is new to Apple Music. He has an iPhone and a MacBook. On his MacBook, he has a lot of original music (he's a musician using Logic Pro X where he bounces a bunch of music on his Mac). We recently started paying for Apple Music for the family. Yesterday, he selected the "sync" option on his Mac so that all of his devices could share music and playlists. It appears that all his "local" songs got uploaded to the cloud.

Question: He really doesn't want to share any playlists with his local music from his Mac to his iPhone, so he really would prefer not to have that local music in the cloud. Is there a safe way to revert that back? We have plenty of iCloud storage, so I don't think having that in the cloud is a problem, but I would still like an answer to whether it is possible to remove just the local songs that came from his computer from the cloud. Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro (2021)

Posted on Sep 3, 2025 07:41 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,711 points

Sep 4, 2025 08:12 AM in response to Alfredo Jahn

Hi,

The Apple Music subscription service allows for the music you have on your computer to be matched or uploaded to the cloud so that it can be automatically accessed on your other devices. If you have content that you specifically want to exclude from the cloud library then one approach is to create a separate Music library on the computer for that content, in which you do not enable the Sync Library option, then hold down option to swap between libraries when required. Alternatively he could potentially delete these tracks from his iPhone, or a second library where Sync Library is enabled, which would remove them from the cloud and any Apple devices. In the primary library their cloud status would change from Uploaded to Removed.

Note your iCloud storage quota is entirely separate from Apple Music.

tt2

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Answer 2

Alfredo Jahn Author

Level 3

929 points

Sep 4, 2025 06:55 PM in response to turingtest2

If you have content that you specifically want to exclude from the cloud library then one approach is to create a separate Music library on the computer for that content, in which you do not enable the Sync Library option, then hold down option to swap between libraries when required.

So if he does this now, after the fact, will it remove the songs in that other (non-synced) library from the cloud?

Alternatively he could potentially delete these tracks from his iPhone, or a second library where Sync Library is enabled, which would remove them from the cloud and any Apple devices. In the primary library their cloud status would change from Uploaded to Removed.

Would this delete those songs (files) on his Mac? He definately doesn't want to lose those local files on his Mac.

Note your iCloud storage quota is entirely separate from Apple Music.

Interesting. I didn't know this.

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