But I’ve also had the same thing happen with iOS updates, and sometimes without any apparent trigger.

There’s one obvious scenario: when we buy a new iPhone and forget to re-download music. The problem I find with both services, but more often with Apple Music, is that it isn’t always there. Indeed, just yesterday Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said that the company was testing going further, and automatically downloading your recently-played music too.

So there’s still a role for local music storage, and happily both Apple Music and Spotify allow us to download music for offline listening. We even sometimes visit places in the world with poor or non-existent mobile coverage. We fly on planes with either no wifi or plans which exclude streaming. We travel on underground metro services that have limited or patchy wifi. However, while Apple sometimes acts like it thinks we all live in an always-connected world of high-speed internet, most of us don’t. *It’s a long story why I use both, and I do plan to drop one or the other before long. I long since switched to streaming music as my primary source, and with unlimited data both at home and on my iPhone, I mostly stream from Spotify* or Apple Music directly. At home, I also streamed all my music locally, from a dedicated netbook and external hard drive connected to my hifi. I used to keep all my music permanently loaded on an iPod, so I always had all my music all the time. Your flight takes off, you browse through the music selection on the in-flight entertainment system, decide you’d rather listen to your own Apple Music downloaded playlists, and then… find they are no longer on your iPhone.ĭownloaded music seems to have a habit of disappearing from our iPhones right when we most need it … It’s an experience I’m sure we’ve all had.

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