Does Family Sharing work with iTunes Match/iCloud Music without an Apple Music subscription?

Prior to this weekend, my family all had different iTunes libraries on different Mac's and different user accounts and we constantly could not access songs we wanted to access. Often you could see a song on your phone that was in the cloud but you could not play it, or you would add it to a playlist on the Mac but it never showed up on the phone.


I have had an iTunes Match subscription under my Apple ID for many years and imported 100's of CD's into this library.

None of us opted into Apple Music, and we do not wish to.

If I understand correctly, iTunes Match is now called iCloud Music Library.


I just spent 72 hours cleaning everything up, following all the articles on Apple Support:


I turned off Home Sharing. I don't even know how this is useful anymore apart from supporting my Apple TV.

I turned off iCloud Music Library on all our devices and Macs and wiped all the music off our phones and iPads.

I now have only 1 iTunes library on our MacBook Pro under my personal user account, with all our music consolidated.

I have Family Sharing enabled and added my wife and daughter, and we still each have our own Apple ID.

I started iTunes and logged into my Apple ID and enabled iCloud Music. Everything is there.

I enabled iCloud Music on my personal iPhone and iPad and everything is there and in sync. Looks great.

I enabled iCloud Music on my wife's iPhone and she can't see the music that is managed by MY iCloud Music Library account. Playlists are also different.


I don't know what to do next. Do we each have to subscribe to iCloud Music? It would be a disaster if I need 3 clouds.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Oct 18, 2015 5:30 PM

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3 replies

Oct 19, 2015 5:01 AM in response to Jimzgoldfinch

Thanks Jim, do you have a reference for that statement, which would help me understand the intended use or best practice I should follow?


as an update, I tried something different:


From my iPhone, I 'shared' a playlist that contained songs my daughter can't see on her iPhone, to my daughter via a text message. In the message she received a link which added the playlist to her Music and all the songs are in it, and she can make them available offline! The playlist has my name in brackets after the playlist name to indicate it was shared.


So 1 working solution is that all members of the family should use my Macbook account and iTunes library to create playlists and then I can send them their playlists.

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Does Family Sharing work with iTunes Match/iCloud Music without an Apple Music subscription?

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