What happens when a matched song gets removed from the iTunes Store?

[ipedro]

Music comes and goes on iTunes. Sometimes an artist or label pulls songs, albums or entire artists off of iTunes.

What happens then? Does iTunes warn you that a song will be removed and to back it up? Or do you just lose access to the music you paid for?

 

[ipedro]

I got an answer to this question that may be interesting to other forum members.

My brother has old episodes of Shazam that he bought years ago on the iTunes store. It no longer exists on the store, you can't buy any episodes, but Apple has kept the shows on their server. My brother can still stream these shows and redownload them via iCloud to his iTunes app.

I would assume the same goes for music. If you kept no physical copies of your tv shows and music and only played them on iPads, iPods and iPhones via iCloud, you would never lose access to this content, even if the content is pulled from the store.

Nonetheless, I'm still keeping a backup of my library in physical form that I update every once in a while.

 

[Shorties]

I got an answer to this question that may be interesting to other forum members.

My brother has old episodes of Shazam that he bought years ago on the iTunes store. It no longer exists on the store, you can't buy any episodes, but Apple has kept the shows on their server. My brother can still stream these shows and redownload them via iCloud to his iTunes app.

I would assume the same goes for music. If you kept no physical copies of your tv shows and music and only played them on iPads, iPods and iPhones via iCloud, you would never lose access to this content, even if the content is pulled from the store.

Nonetheless, I'm still keeping a backup of my library in physical form that I update every once in a while.

Yeah along these same lines I've recently noticed that some of my tracks which are not available in the US store, (and have never been) are being matched anyway with the copies they have on their servers for other countries. So I can only assume their licensing deals are separate from stuff on match and stuff in their stores.

 

[SuperCachetes]

I'll go one better (and further off-topic)...

I have a playlist that I wanted to gift my sister; all of the songs were available in the iTunes store, but not all of them matched for whatever reason.

When I went to gift the playlist, iTunes told me ALL of the songs were available for gifting and I was able to send 100% of the playlist as a gift... Even though iTunes would not match all of the songs on my hard drive when I signed up for iTunes Match. Sigh. 🙄

 

[ipedro]

Yeah along these same lines I've recently noticed that some of my tracks which are not available in the US store, (and have never been) are being matched anyway with the copies they have on their servers for other countries. So I can only assume their licensing deals are separate from stuff on match and stuff in their stores.

I think you've pointed out why my brother is still able to stream his show even though it doesn't appear in the iTunes store. It's probably available in another country.

Unfortunately, I've just now confirmed that if a TV show is delisted from iTunes, you will no longer have access to it unless you downloaded a copy to your iTunes library.

I've been moving my iTunes library to a new computer and found several examples of shows that I purchased a long time ago and have backed up in my iTunes library but that do not show up in iCloud for download or streaming.

This is a serious problem with purchasing TV shows on iOS devices. You only purchase the rights to this show but it is not downloaded to AppleTV (there's no hard drive) or even sent to your iTunes library. You'll have to remember to download it when you're back at your computer to make sure you have a backup.

 

[KeithJenner]

I have a number of purchased songs which are no longer available in the iTunes store, and it is a real mixed bag as to whether they are available, either to download from iTunes, or showing as purchased in iTunes Match.

I would keep a local backup of absolutely everything purchased from iTunes. There seems to be little rhyme or reason as to whether they will still be available once they leave the store.

Having said that, I suspect that with the advent of iCloud and iTunes Match, a little more consistency will be apparent, and it is probably more likely that they will still be available.