Issues Downloading from itunes Match

itunes match is of no use to me. I only got it hoping it would save everything before my hard drive was replaced, but no such luck so I didn't renew. I downloaded all of music both to my mac and my iphone, however, upon not renewing the service, music that had certainly been downloaded to my phone (indicated by the phone with a checkmark icon) were back soley on the cloud that I have to pay $25 for. Has anyone else run into this issue or know a way around having to spend more money to get my music back? (Apple doesn't keep purchase history for more than 4 years, so more than 3/4 of my library can't be simply re-downloaded. I have contacted apple numerous times about recovering older purchase history and the only response I got that actually addressed my issue said they could try to look up individual songs by the each order number, which I had no idea I had to keep for thousands of purchases.)