If you're paying for Apple Music, just hit the download button on whatever device you want to store it on. All done. It is of course a DRM-infested nightmare that you in no sense "own" and will vanish in a puff of licensing if you ever unsubscribe. But it's there!

Sidebar: I believe that the old "iTunes Music Store" also still exists, so you _can_ pay $10 flat and actually be delivered a copy of the album using non-DRMed AAC files. But at that point you may as well see if the artist has a Bandcamp.

hmmm ok time to run an experiment

How does Apple Music handle your Bandcamp stuff?

If you've got a mac or PC that you can sync your iphone to like a caveman, pretty well: you just drop the bandcamp mp3s into music.app (do they still call it itunes on windows?) and set it up to sync local music files to your phone. Not sure how it works if you're mobile-first/only.

There's also apple's "itunes match" which is still available to subscribe to outside of Apple Music/One — with that enabled it makes a copy of your local mp3 audio files and syncs them to all of your mobile devices as if they were Apple Music tracks. support.apple.com/en-us/108935

(I live in fear of them turning itunes match off entirely, but so far they seem to have been content to let it ride. In any case the files it syncs are just copies of the ones you give to it, so if the service vanishes you'll still have the non-DRM files around.)

Well, it imported just fine locally into Apple Music, but I'm stuck waiting for The Cloud^tm (iTunes Match, I guess) to do its thing...

Ah, yeah, should have said up front: To my mind, the biggest and worst wart on the entire Apple Music / iTunes Match ecosystem is that there is _zero_ visibility into it. Sometimes sync is immediate. Sometimes it takes minutes. Sometimes it's hours. And there's no way to tell what state it's in.

About 97% of the time it "just works" but oof that 3%.

🤷‍♂️