iTunes Music Bug Victim gets Personal Visit from Apple
James Pinkstone blogged a week or so ago about how his personal iTunes music library was wiped away by Apple Music, and his Apple support call led him to believe that was simply how the streaming music service worked. Sign up, and Apple Music blasts away your library, forcing you to pay monthly to listen to the songs you owned only moments before. That's a pretty crappy business model, and is exactly not how Apple Music works.
The problem is that in some cases, however, that's just what happens: User's personal libraries, or at least parts of those libraries, are arbitrarily deleted. It's frustrating for users because they lose music they own, and it's frustrating for Apple because the problem happens rarely and the cause is eluding their engineers. It doesn't help that Amber told Mr. Pinkstone that's what Apple Music is supposed to do, and that's why she doesn't use the service.
Apple's two man team spent a couple days working with Mr. Pinkstone and his Mac in hopes of replicating the bug. They didn't succeed, but they do have more information to work with as they hunt for the real cause. In the mean time, Apple is adding new safeguards to help prevent the mystery bug from wiping out music libraries.
You could say this is a publicity move on Apple's part, which is possible, but I don't think that's the case. An easier publicity move would've been to give Mr. Pinkstone gobs of iTunes Store credits so he could rebuild his library. Instead, Apple flew two engineers across the country to personally work with him and try to replicate the bug. Apple wanted real data they could use to fix the problem—an esoteric bug that only few people are experiencing.
When the Apple-Music-killed-my-iTunes-library hit the Web I assumed the problem was a crappy and confusing iTunes interface that led to user error and lost songs. What I'm sure of now is that Apple is serious about stopping this bug from deleting any more music, and Amber's next employee evaluation won't go so well.