downloading songs from icloud to iphone

If you want to load music from your own CDs onto your iPhone, the main way to do that is with a Mac or PC. You import the music onto the Mac or PC, then connect the iPhone to the Mac or PC with a cable and synchronize its Music library against the computer's.

This goes back to the way things worked with the very first non-iOS-based iPod.

There are two other newer types of synchronization:

• The iTunes Match subscription service
• The Sync Library feature of the Apple Music subscription service. If this feature is on, synced versions of songs may contain DRM. If this feature is off, you can only listen to subscription songs when connected to the Internet – the Music application on the Mac refuses to download offline listening copies unless I enable the iCloud Music Library, which I do not want to do. I am assuming the iPhone would also refuse to download any offline listening copies unless I enabled the seemingly unrelated iCloud Music Library / Sync Library feature.

How did they get into iCloud in the first place?

Apple has iOS sandboxed, making it hard for apps to get access to things outside certain boundaries set for them. For that reason I only really use my iPhone for very basics such as making phone calls. You can see if an app such as VLC can play something in in iCloud but you would have to download it to your phone first.

That's what Apple Music is for.

There may be other ways using third party players and treating the music files as data files but I haven't seen an outline of how to do it using those.

If you want to buy music for your iPhone, another option is to buy it from Apple using the iTunes Store app on the iPhone.