"Is Apple Music putting DRM on my files?" someone asked me today.

The short answer is no, but it's worth explaining why you might think and why it might appear that Apple is DRMing (or copy protecting) your music.

Serenity Caldwell at iMore has the full rundown, but the real solution is to not delete your non-copy-protected music files. Here's what that means.

Apple Music vs. iTunes Match
Apple Music ($9.99/mo) is DRMed, because it's a subscription service. When it "matches" the songs you own, it matches them against its list of DRMed files.

iTunes Match ($25/yr) is different from Apple Music, and it is not DRMed. When it matches songs, it matches them against a list of non-DRMed files.

Apple's new iCloud "Music Library" is not a library. It's an index. It never stores your actual music files, unless they're songs Apple has never seen before. Mostly, it just ticks off names on a list. The items in the cloud aren't your files. If you re-download items from the cloud, you may get copy-protected files, even if you originally owned non-copy-protected versions. The files you own, however, are not being replaced.

Here's an example of how you can screw up. I bought "Video Killed the Radio Star" from the iTunes Store. It wasn't DRMed; it was an m4a file. Then I decided to see if the rest of that old Buggles album was interesting at all, so I went into Apple Music and added it to my library. That added an option for a second, seemingly identical copy of the same song to be downloaded. That second version is poisoned; it's an Apple Music subscription file. But now I have what appears to be two identical songs in my library. If I clear out the wrong one, I'm left with a DRMed version of a song I used to own.

Apple Music is smart enough not to overwrite your non-DRMed songs. I downloaded an Apple playlist with 22 new songs, and two I owned. The two I owned stayed non-DRMed, while the rest were copy-protected. But if I were to delete my existing copy and redownload those songs, they would be DRMed.

iTunes Match Bugs
A bigger problem comes when you try to involve iTunes Match.

iTunes Match used to let you redownload 256kbps, non-copy-protected AAC versions of anything that had ever been on your hard drive. But the comments on Caldwell's story indicate that it may have become terribly buggy. So people who "upload" songs to Match, delete the originals, and re-download find themselves getting the copy-protected Apple Music versions. Caldwell says this is a bug.

In a second Match bug, it looks like for some people, Apple Music-curated playlists are overriding iTunes Match. In other words, if they download or subscribe to an Apple Music-curated playlist that contains some tracks that, according to iTunes Match, they should be getting non-DRMed versions of, they get DRMed versions instead.

Literally as I was writing this column, Apple released a new version of iTunes, which supposedly fixes these bugs. But to reiterate, the real solution is to not delete your non-copy-protected music files.

How to Solve This Problem

Apple will not add DRM to the files on your computer, but if you try to download additional copies of those files from Apple's database, they may be DRMed.

If that really concerns you, turn off iCloud Music Library and locally sync your devices with your computer like you did in the past.

If you have too much music to store on your PC, meanwhile, try a service like Dropbox or Google Drive, or check out our list of the best external hard drives for your media library.