If there are any Apple Music engineers reading this: My wife and I changed our Apple ID country/region a few weeks ago. Without warning, we both lost our entire Apple Music library.
I’m a little surprised that a service with 40M subscribers doesn’t seem to consider that users might do this.
Interesting. When I changed my Apple ID region I couldn't do it without canceling my subscription first. Just canceling wasn't enough though, as my current subscription period wouldn't end until later. I had to contact customer support to have them terminate my subscription prematurely to switch regions immediately.
After switching regions I also switched back to Spotify and I haven't bothered using it since. I just went back to check in the Apple Music after reading this—surprise surprise, all my playlists and songs are gone too.
Yeah, we had to wait until our Apple Music subscription expired too.
In general the country switching experience seems pretty sub par: if you had just purchased a year long app subscription (I believe some apps can offer that), your options for changing country would either be to forfeit your purchase by calling up to terminate the subscription, or wait an entire year for it to expire...
Apple Music has regularly screwed up the playlists in my library, removing most of the songs on them for mysterious reasons in several instances.
If my Mac routinely deleted files from the filesystem Apple would be working overtime to fix it, but with Apple Music data loss seems to be the norm.
I looked into switching to Spotify recently, but one of the first songs I looked for wasn't available which turned me off (the song is available on Apple Music).
Yes, playlists are really broken on Apple Music. If you remove an album from your library, its titles will be removed from all of your playlists too. The song ordering is also not consistent between the mobile app and desktop iTunes.
Well, your Apple ID is the key to your music library.
How else would they tie it? Anything else used as the key would still cause you to lose your library if you changed it.
Besides, was it really lost? You can switch your old ID to a new ID and keep your library. Was it lost or merely waiting for you to link it to the new ID?
I’m a little surprised that a service with 40M subscribers doesn’t seem to consider that users might do this.