Did Apple Steal This Artist's Music?

According to a Vellum blog post by James Pinkstone, Apple Inc. AAPL now deletes music files off of Apple Music customers’ hard drives.

When users sign up for Apple Music, Apple scans their computers for music files, looks for matches in its database, then deletes the files from their hard drives.

Music files for which Apple can not find a match are downloaded to Apple’s database and then also deleted from hard drives.

When Pinkstone could no longer find his music files on his computer, including the personal musical compositions he had recorded, he called Apple to verify their policies.

“The software is functioning as intended,” an Apple representative told Pinkstone, confirming that Apple software is designed to delete personal files from users’ internal hard drives without asking permission.

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Pinkstone outlined four problems with this policy:
1. Once music files are deleted from a computer, users must have wifi access to listen to them via Apple Music.
2. Apple’s software isn’t great at finding “matches” for music files, especially rare live recordings or alternative versions of popular songs.
3. Users can get songs back from Apple after they’re lost, but they must potentially spend hours and hours retrieving them
4. Apple converts all files to Mp3 format, meaning that higher-quality recordings in WAV format will be lost forever.

Pinkstone concluded that Apple’s policy of deleting files from users’ computers is like Netflix, Inc. NFLX coming to its subscribers’ homes and stealing DVDs.

Disclosure: the author holds no position in the stocks mentioned.