Limits Were Made to Be Broken

Apple doesn’t say explicitly why iTunes Match works only with music libraries containing 25,000 songs or fewer, but it’s not too difficult to guess. If your library contains that much music, you’re likely an avid, frequent listener, and Apple needs a lot of storage space to store your music and a lot of bandwidth to stream it.

Don’t forget: Apple essentially offers you amnesty for any tracks you may have in your library that you acquired by less-than-legal means—in exchange for the $24.99 iTunes Match fee. You pay the price, and you get access to DRM-free, high-quality copies of your music. It’s possible that the 25,000 song limit is a demand made by record companies, not Apple.

One point of clarification: Songs you purchase with your iTunes Match Apple ID from the iTunes Store do not count against the 25,000 song limit. So, when we refer to this limit, it’s not necessarily a hard numerical limit. If you purchase 100,000 songs from Apple, you can still use iTunes Match, as long as you have no more than 125,000 songs in total (see Figure 3.1).