Ineligible Music - an example

So after eliminating a few corrupted files the remaining 12 problem files show in iTunes as 6 purchased and 6 protected. When I actually inspect the files however all have the extension .m4p and when I try to convert a "purchased" file I get the message "could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats".

So there's something wrong somewhere -- I think they are all protected files. I suspect somewhere in the past 20 or so years files that I bought from iTunes moved out of Apple's catalog and were no longer available for sale. This triggered a bug in some version of Apple Match such that a "purchased" version was created but the "purchased" version was in fact identical to the "protected" (except the bug confused iTunes metadata).

So these are "protected" AAC that cannot match to anything in Apple's library. Normally this would result in an upload, but I suspect Apple doesn't allow uploads of "protected" files (since they are supposed to just match).

They can still be played, but they are otherwise in limbo. They are DRMd of course, so nothing I have access to will do the conversion.

It would be nice if Apple were to give me my money back ... but I suppose they work as well as they ever did. They just don't fit the modern model.

In one case I had a "Protected AAC" that matched and a "Purchased" that was flagged as a duplicate. I deleted the "Protected" and then the "Purchased" turned to ineligible and could not be matched in iCloud.

iTunes won't convert them and won't export as AAC since they are protected/purchased. I dug in further with two songs in particular and they aren't available in the Apple Music Library. I thought Music.app/iTunes would then upload them but it won't.

thanks for your help! I might try Apple Support just for fun, but it's really a small amount of lost money and they weren't the apex of music :-).