Yesterday, the Apple news world was abuzz with a change that Apple is rolling out to Apple Music subscribers. The change effects the way that iCloud Music Library tracks are matched. Instead of using metadata, as it had before, iTunes will now employ the same acoustic fingerprinting technique used by iTunes Match.
This change means that iTunes is more likely to accurately match your music. And, now, if you want to download your matched tracks to another Apple device, those tracks come down without DRM (digital rights management). This makes is easier to not lose your music if you unsubscribe from Apple Music without carefully checking that you have at least one copy of all your tracks locally.
To read about all the picky details, see Kirk McElhearn’s Macworld article.
According to Jim Dalrymple in his article at The Loop, Apple is rolling out the new matching service to 1% or 2% of its users per day. If your iCloud Music Library is now matching with acoustic fingerprinting, you’ll see Matched in the iCloud Status column for newly matched music, instead of Apple Music.