This is probably pilot error on my part, but I am really struggling to figure out how to manage my music on my iPhone 4S (latest iOS6). I have the annual subscription to iTunes Match, and iTunes 11 on my Mountain Lion MBP. My iPhone is tight on space, so I'd like to remove songs from the iPhone but keep them on my MBP and in the cloud so I can have them for my Apple TV streaming. I went into my music library and unchecked a bunch of songs, and then did a sync, that didn't help. Under options for my iPhone in iTunes, i've selected "sync only check songs and videos", that looks to be the only option that applies here. I also went to "on this iphone" and then clicked the "add to" button. Here, I deleted several songs, but kept them in the cloud. The songs show the cloud icon. But, when I click done, and do a sync, nothing changes on my iPhone. Any tips to help me address this issue so I can recover some storage space on my iPhone? thanks!
With iTunes Match, the whole "sync only checked songs and videos" option doesn't apply. With iTunes Match, you are not doing any syncing. Only streaming/downloading content to your phone. With iTunse Match, all of the songs you see in your music app on your iPhone are in the cloud, not on your phone (unless you click the button to download them, or I think play the song). That's the purpose of it, to keep your phone's space open and just stream your content. Now, the way iTunes Match is supposed to work is that you can stream all the content, that's the way it's set up. When you first enable iTunes Match on your phone, it wipes all the music currently stored. From there, you stream songs unless you choose (by hitting the download button next to a song/album) to download them. On iOS 5, you were able to delete songs from your iPhone that you had downloaded with iTunes Match. Now, where I see your problem lies is with a fault of iOS 6. As of now (and until 6.1 comes along to fix it), you can stream the songs as normal, or download them. However, once they are downloaded (on iOS 6), you cannot delete them. This will be fixed with iOS 6.1 (as per the beta).
Thanks for the very helpful information. Looks like I now officially have a reason to follow 6.1 beta news