I copy a lot of music to my phone - but it just kind of automatically appears playable there when I buy it - and I can "download" it onto the iPhone by clicking on the cloud icon. Presumably some combination of iCloud / iTunes match takes care of that for me in the background.
I just realized the one thing that I am missing, that I've heard can be done with iTunes, is the ability to delete an album. iPhone only lets you delete one song at a time - which is painful if you have a lower capacity iPhone.
Good reason to buy a 128 GB iPhone and just never worry about it again.
I have hard time seeing iPhone last more than 3 years. That is 36 months, or $360 of spotify subscription. Now price difference between 16GB and 128GB for iPhone 6 is $200 before tax. This comes roughly just under two years and is about average interval tech savvy people update their phones at.
This is just putting things in perspective, unless you have very specific needs of your phone I do not think 16GB is enough anymore, 64GB is definitely way to go.
I use my iPhone a lot - blowing through 64 GB is pretty trivial. It's not even clear to me that 128 GB will get me through the full two years, but, at least I won't have to spend all my time deleting / re-downloading music. And, might be able to keep a few videos (I've had to delete them all off my iPhone to make space).
I spend a lot of time traveling overseas, and have been hit by more than a few >$500 phone bills, even with the international data plan and lots of use of WiFi Dongles+Local SIMs. The more data, maps, podcasts, music I can store locally, the less use of data required.
I probably won't be happy until we get a 256 GB iPhone, which, on current trends, probably won't be for another 3-4 years unfortunately.
To put it another way - 128 GB isn't enough for me to stop worrying about saving space on my iPhone, but it is enough that there is little value in me shuffling music on/off it.
If you pay for iTunes Match, import all of your non-iTunes music into iTunes, Apple will store a DRM-free AAC file (256 kbit/s) in the "cloud" which you can play/import directly onto your mobile devices (without sync/tether).
You only have to pay for iTunes Match when you have new music to import. Once imported it is available "forever."
PS - I ironically used this to escape the Apple ecosystem. You can use it to strip DRM from old Apple DRM-ed music. You import it using match, and it converts it from an AAC-DRM track to an AAC DRM-free one and ups the quality from 128 to 256 Kbit/s.
It gives you the highest quality Apple has for the song, if it's matched. I had a ton of terribly transcoded files that got replaced with 256kbps AAC files. In my reading and own personal testing the difference between 256kbps AAC and 320MP3 is negligible. The only issue I ran into was some stuff didn't full match an album. I would get 10 out of 12 tracks matched, or 5 out of 12. Still for 18K songs I think I only had 100-200 that didn't end up being matched.
Amazon does offer this too but I have no idea how well it works in comparison.
