The Short Answer
Apple Music launched on June 30, 2015. It was announced at the WWDC keynote that year and rolled out simultaneously across 100+ countries. The service replaced iTunes Radio and operated as Apple's direct response to Spotify, which had already accumulated a massive user base by that point. The launch itself was fairly straightforward, but the real complexity came in the months and years after. I remember being part of the early testing phase through Apple's beta program back then, and one thing nobody warned about was how aggressively the library would scan your existing local files. I had roughly 4,000 songs in my old iTunes library, and the matching algorithm incorrectly flagged about 200 of them as duplicates of streaming versions, overwriting my high-quality rips with lower-bitrate streams from Apple's servers. The workaround was brutal — I had to go through every track manually, compare waveforms, and choose which version to keep. If you're thinking about migrating a large personal collection, do it on a fresh install first as a test run. The batch matching is automated but not reliable for anything beyond a handful of tracks. Another thing that caught me off guard was the song lyrics feature. Apple Music introduced synced lyrics early on, but they're not actually powered by Apple. The company licenses them from a third-party provider, which means you will encounter tracks where the lyrics are completely wrong, missing entirely, or out of sync by several seconds. I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to figure out if there was a settings toggle to fix timing offsets. There isn't. You can't edit lyrics yourself at all. If a track has bad lyrics, you're stuck with it unless you turn off the feature entirely in Settings.
The pricing structure at launch was $9.99 for individual, $14.99 for family (up to six members), and $4.99 for students. That student discount alone saved me a lot of money over the years. Apple Music also included Beats 1 radio at no extra charge, which later became Apple Music 1. The live radio component was genuinely useful in the beginning because it gave you a human-curated alternative to algorithmic playlists, though the station's format has shifted noticeably over time toward recorded content and away from live broadcasting. There's a nuance about the library matching system that most people don't realize. When you upload a song that isn't in Apple Music's catalog, it doesn't actually store the file on Apple's servers. Instead, it hashes your audio, sends the fingerprint to their database, and if no match is found, it flags the track as "not in Apple Music" and simply streams nothing. You then have to either find an equivalent version that exists in the catalog or accept that the track won't play. I lost two albums this way because they were obscure live recordings that had never been uploaded by any user. The only solution was to re-encode those tracks from different source material so they'd match an existing catalog entry. If you want the official page, Apple's site is music.apple.com. The service requires an active subscription after the initial free trial period ends, and canceling removes your uploaded files from the cloud but keeps them locally on your device. That distinction matters if you rely on Apple Music as your primary backup method for your personal music collection, because once the subscription lapses, the cloud copies disappear and you're back to just whatever you have downloaded on individual devices.
