Apple Music deleted 3000 local files of my personal, pre-existing music collection that are gone unless I continue to pay for their service..
I just got off the phone with Apple Support and I'm really upset about this, so heed this as a warning. I will never subscribe to Apple Music again after this. I know this is partially my own fault for not having a better and more recent backup but I also think Apple is at fault for a lack of transparency with this.
I've had years worth of music files in my Music library from old CDs, etc. and I've spent a lot of time and effort curating my library for my phone. I thought I'd give Apple Music a try to easily add new music but for budgetary reasons I decided to cancel after a recent promotional trial. I did have syncing my music library turned off on my phone since I only wanted selected playlists and predominantly used Apple Music on my phone as well to keep up with new releases, etc. Today, a few days after my subscription ended, I discovered that half my library was stuck in the cloud, would not play, would not download. These same songs were also missing from my own documents folders where iTunes media files sit. I talked to Apple Support and I was told that since these songs were 'matched' with Apple Music files, my pre-existing files were overwritten and deleted, and so the only way to get these songs back is to resubscribe to Apple Music - which would consequently be deleted again even if I downloaded them off the cloud and turned off iCloud sharing/storage, as they are now Apple Music files rather than my own.
As you can imagine I'm quite distraught about this and would appreciate if anyone does have a workaround for this. A lot of the files (though not anywhere close to all) are still on my iPhone but I'm afraid of losing them as soon as I plug it in if the files sync the wrong way. I acknowledge that I could have saved myself the trouble by being better with backing up my library, perhaps missing some sort of fine print somewhere, but the lack of transparency or assistance from Apple through this whole thing has left me very sour.