Why has iTunes Match deleted my playlists?

This fixed my problem: deleted playlists on iPhone then synched to iMac iTunes and my playlists were deleted on the iMac. This is why Apple is so great. Yes there is the occasional jerk that chastises us "less than brilliant people" but for the most part everyone is cool and wants to help. Thanks! About to order my iPhone 6 plus now😎

If anyone is still without remedy to this problem, I just "found" my old playlists on my phone (i4s). Open iTunes, in the lower icon bar you see RADIO, PLAYLISTS, ARTISTS, SONGS, and MORE.....Click MORE. You then see a vertical list containing ALBUMS, GENRES, COMPILATIONS, COMPOSERS, and SHARED.....Click SHARED. I forgot my wifes name is on my laptop because it used to be hers. I checked her name instead of my phones name which was currently checked......Wa-La.....my playlists were in there and reappeared on my phone.

Okay - maybe you can help me with this. I had playlists I created on my phone from songs I had purchased. They were synced to the cloud then the computer. Remember the key - I created these ON MY PHONE. I didn't renew my iTunes Match and it deleted EVERY playlist from my phone. They are still on my computer, but they won't sync back to my phone. It tells me my last backup was yesterday, but when I try to restore it then tells me my last backup was almost two years ago. I have renewed iTunes Match (there's a scam right there) but still can't get my playlists back on my phone. It's telling me that they are icloud playlists and won't let me duplicate the playlists as playlists on the computer.

Looks like I've lost music too.

What "genius" in Cupertino developed a new version of iTunes that has the capacity to erase your playlists? Fire their ***! Good thing Mike posted this because it works. What the heII kind of jiggery-pokery is this (hey if that imbecile on the SCOTUS can use it, so can I)?

Was this a ploy to get us to use Apple Music? I don't do lossy music. Get that through the apple skins.

Thanks, Ryan

This approach also works if you accidentally delete a playlist on a device linked to Apple Music. This action deletes the playlist from iTunes.

However, I found that to fully recover the playlists so that they persisted I had to disconnect my home computer (main iTunes install) from the internet first to stop it deleting the playlists when iTunes was reinvoked after replacing the backup .itl file. Then I could duplicate the old playlists at leisure, in effect creating new ones that my iTunes account didn't know about. Once I reconnected the machine to the internet, Apple Music then removed the deleted playlists and I was left with the duplicates only. Which I could subsequently rename and export as you suggest.