As I’ve said, I use Apple Music because it’s convenient, it’s baked into my iPhone, and it’s a good value considering how much I use it (the conjunction of these points amounts to, essentially, laziness). The reason I bring it up is this via Marco Arment:

This Apple Music horror story is making the rounds today. It sounds like either a severe user error or a severe bug, and there’s no way to know which it is, but regardless, this aside is good advice:

For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “Hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

Own your data.

I keep my personal media, like rare MP3s I found of my favorite bands, demos my friends have given me, and songs I’ve made, completely separate from iTunes, and you should too. This is closely related the point that Apple is your biggest dependency (and that’s usually fine). It didn’t used to be this way, when I could trust iTunes and it’s simple filesystem storage, but when I signed up for iTunes Match, that got really complicated and so I moved those files.

For related reading, here’s Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read”, which will make you either paranoid or scoff.