jad814

Q: Apple Music Songs Added to Playlists are Storing Locally to My iPhone?

Myself, and a number of close friends, recently started dabbling in Apple Music (as existing Spotify users considering converting).  I/we started building Playlists similarly to what we've previously done in Spotify (essentially to quickly have somewhat of a virtual "Library" so you don't have to search the entire library for something you listen to or want shuffled into a Playlist often).  What we noticed is our device (all iPhones in this case) memory started getting eaten up.  This seemed very conceptually opposed to paying for a "streaming" music service, and none of us ever were given memory warnings that queued us to isolate this cause with substantially larger Libraries/Playlists in Spotify.

 

I just got off the phone with Apple Support, where the employee I spoke to (who also kindly checked with her Lead), informed me that Music added to Playlists (and also likely "My Library") are actually storing the song(s) locally.

 

I would totally understand storing Library/Playlist songs locally (affecting device storage) if I've explicitly opted to "Make Available Offline" but seeing as I haven't done that, I find this a substantial short-coming of this service.  Can anyone please give me a second opinion as to whether this is, in fact, the case?  I just can't seem to believe that is truly the design...

 

Thanks in advance!

iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 8.4

Posted on Aug 4, 2015 7:54 AM