iTunes Match Problems Grow
Before Apple released its own music service, there was iTunes Match. This allows you to ‘match’ your personal music library. with Apple's collection. Then you can play music on all your devices, without having to subscribe to Apple Music. It costs €25 a year and it still exists.
Many people have switched to Apple Music in the meantime, but there are also users who prefer to keep using iTunes Match because it allows you to store your own music collection in iCloud. It hasn't worked quite well for a week, according to numerous reports on Reddit and on the Apple Support Forums. After the release of Apple Music 3.6, iTunes Match is totally broken. “You can download all your files in the cloud, but if you upload more it won't respond. It hasn't worked for a week,” said one Reddit user.
Others also report that iTunes keeps crashing on ‘matching’ of the music with songs in the iTunes Store. Months ago, problems regularly surfaced, but since a week the number of complaints has increased explosively. Most users run macOS Big Sur on their computers. It's still unclear if it's a temporary bug, or if Apple has plans to pull the plug on iTunes Match and try to communicate it in this unsympathetic way. Currently, it is a service that Apple is not actively promoting. All attention is focused on bringing in new subscribers to Apple Music.
Apple's outage status page shows no indication of a problem with iTunes Match or with iCloud in general. Apple Support staff would not be aware of the problem, customers who sought help noted. They were told that it would probably be a hardware problem.
iTunes Match has been around since 2011 and may still make sense to some people. It's cheaper than Apple Music, and if you have a massive music collection, you'll still have plenty to listen to. It can be downloaded songs or music that you have ripped from your own CDs. With iTunes Match, you do miss recent features such as lossless audio quality and Dolby Atmos.