Streaming cache is converting to permanent download

When I stream music on Apple Music on my iPhone, the songs that are cached, which includes those that I am playing as well as the few songs queued past that, are being converted to permanent downloads in Apple Music.

It is not clear to me how immediately this conversion is taking place, but I will notice that when I open Apple Music, go to the Downloads section, and scroll down to Recent Downloads, it will show many things that I did not specifically, intentionally download, but which I did recently stream or have queued. What clued me into it being the cache is specifically the fact that these downloads will include the handful of songs after those that I played, which would have been added to the play queue and then cached in advance, even if I ultimately did not end up playing them.

My settings allow for streaming over WiFi or data, but only downloads over WiFi. I don’t know if these settings have allowed for this issue to arise, but I do suspect that it is only songs cached while streaming on WiFi that are then being switched to downloaded, as though the phone is identifying that they were “downloaded” on WiFi and therefor should be labeled as true downloads, while a song streamed on data does not get this treatment. I may be wrong and there are songs downloaded from cache over data, but it seems as though it is restricted to WiFi.

It is also worth noting that I do not have the setting for Automatic Downloads on, so this is not a case of me mistaking automatic downloads for downloads from cache.

Ultimately this is a real pain because it is a drain on my phone storage and it is cluttering up my music downloads, which I try to manage quite precisely. To add to the frustration, because these are scattered groupings of songs, the only way to delete them is by deleting them song by song, since an incompletely downloaded album cannot be removed from a device as a whole unit.

If I have missed some obvious setting that is creating this situation, I would love to hear about it, but I am fairly certain that this is just a bug. I would love for Apple to fix this, though it’s worth acknowledging that it may be specific to my fairly old iPhone.

My current specs:

iPhone 8

iOS 16.1.2 (issue goes back to at least iOS 15)