iCloud Music

It sounds to me you like living dangerously. I wouldn't trust iCloud with my only copy of media.

iCloud is a service that allows you to redownload songs ( that are still available for redownload - there is no guarantee that anything will always be available).

You cannot delete anything from iCloud, as it is not a dedicated storage for your music. It is a service that you can use if you need to do so.

You should keep everything stored on your computer and you should always maintain a backup copy of your computer

You received an incomplete answer, Evlwaze.

If you have music living locally on your hard drive and it has been uploaded to iCloud (or matched to an Apple track in their library), you can safely delete it by right clicking on the entry and selecting delete. Then further select delete file. The song that was uploaded (and just deleted) should still have an entry in iTunes, but it will now show an Available for Download icon in the iCloud Download column (see image below). (Activate this column temporarily if it's not showing in your music library.) If that download cloud exists, the song track now resides in iCloud or it's a track that Apple already had on hand is allowing you to "borrow" it.

NOW....MY ADVICE ON DELETING THE SONG FILE AND RELATING TO BACKING UP IS THE SAME AS WHAT THE OTHER COMMENTERS POSTED. Backing up your data and maintaining personal control over it is, of course, a best practice for securing data. In my case, CrashPlan has a copy of all my original music so I don't have any residing on my local drive. If you have use an external drive or use a backup service, then there could be any number of very legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want those music files on your local drive.

So in direct response to your question, this is how you delete music from iTunes and not from iCloud.

If you have limited space on your local drive, using iCloud Music in this way will potentially save you a lot of hard drive space depending on the size of your music library. (The same goes for the new iCloud Photos Library feature.)

Evlwaze, also be aware that if you use iCloud Library and someday discontinue the service, your iCloud music library becomes inactive. You would then have to go back to using your original files ... but if you don't back them up before deleting them from your local drive, that would be impossible.

roaminggnome wrote:

You cannot delete anything from iCloud, as it is not a dedicated storage for your music. It is a service that you can use if you need to do so.

Certain things will "always" exist in iCloud. Purchases you make from the iTunes store will "always" be there unless Apple discontinues the service, or the distributor requests the item be pulled from the Store (which is why you cannot rely upon iCloud to substitute for a backup).

When you sign up for Match or Apple Music, a version of non-Store purchases on your computer may be uploaded to iCloud, or a copy in the iTunes Store may be matched and activated for you to use instead of uploading your copy. Those will remain there until a 30 day (currently) period after your subscription to one of those services ends. I don't know how it works if you desired to remove one of them from iCloud prior to that and if you even can. However, they will disappear after your subscription ends, so in that regard you can delete some items from iCloud.