I signed up for Apple’s iTunes Match service months ago and realize I’m not using it at all any more. How can I cancel iTunes Match?
Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to mark your subscription to iTunes Match not to renew when your renewal time rolls around, but as far as I can tell, the bad news is that you can’t actually cancel the service: you paid for a year, and that’s what you get, whether you use it or not.
The concept behind iTunes Match is certainly a neat one: every song in your iTunes library is matched against a “cloud” based version so that you can effectively listen to any and every track you have on every device you’ve logged in to your iTunes account. If you’re not using it, however, it’s not such a good deal, even if it were $0.99/year!
To cancel your annual iTunes Match subscription, you’ll need to get to your iTunes Account, which you can do through the iTunes app on an iOS device or the iTunes program on your Mac or Windows PC. I’ll go through the iTunes program on my MacBook Pro.
I do want to say that Apple’s really good at not just surprising you with renewals, sending out email weeks in advance reminding you that the iTunes Match renewal is coming up:
$24.99 isn’t bad if you use the service (that’s a mere $0.06/day) but I don’t any more, so I too want to cancel. To do that, launch the iTunes app, then find “View My Account…” from the “Account” menu:
Once you make this choice, you’ll have to log in again to ensure someone else doesn’t sneak in and mess things up:
Hopefully you remember your password and this is an easy step to accomplish!
Once you’re logged in, there’s a lot of info shown on the screen, but scroll down to “Settings”:
Notice the last entry: “Subscriptions“. That’s what you want, so click on the “Manage” link immediately adjacent. You’ll see the subscription or subscriptions you have active (or expired) with handy reminder icons:
Notice that the second subscription shown above is expired and is not set to renew or charge me again. The first one, however, iTunes Match, is poised and ready to charge me on May 21, just a few weeks from today. Not so good. To change it, I click on “Edit”.
You can probably guess what to do at this point: Click the “Cancel Subscription” button here on the iTunes Match info screen. Changed your mind and don’t want to cancel it? Click on “Done” instead, no harm, no foul! 🙂
But let’s say you do want to proceed and you did click on cancel subscription. Here’s what you see next:
Again, notice that Apple’s reminding you that you’re not cancelling iTunes Match, you’re cancelling the subscription renewal. This means that you’ll continue to have access to your iTunes Match library of music until the date your latest subscription runs out. Makes sense if you think about it and realize Apple isn’t interested in giving pro-rated refunds for unused portions of subscriptions.
A click on “Confirm” and you’re done. Now your active subscription to iTunes Match will show an expiration date instead of a renewal date:
The only question left: what music service are you using instead? Me? I’m really enjoying Spotify Premium…
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yours is the only website that supplied the information I needed to cancel my subscription to I-Tunes Match. Very much appreciated.