Level 1 (4 points)

Protected music previously bought not playing

I have lived in a number of different countries throughout my life and bought music on itunes in the past. It was downloaded onto my computer - thousands of songs over the years. I have been trying to play some songs I bought while living in Japan in 2014. When I inspect the info of the song shown in finder it is shown as "protected MPEG-4 audio" and shows in /Users/######/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/#####/######

I have logged into the account in which I bought it. When I try to access previous purchases, the list does not go further back than 2016. The music shows in my Music player but when I click play, it won't.

I am afraid to delete and try to redownload as the music doesn't show in my purchases list. Is this just a by-product of getting old? I bought the music legally and would like to be able to play it but can't. Any ideas?

Posted on Oct 15, 2026 2:28 PM

2 replies

Servant of Cats

Level 9 (55,707 points)

Oct 15, 2026 5:30 PM in response to kangayou

kangayou wrote:

I have lived in a number of different countries throughout my life and bought music on itunes in the past. It was downloaded onto my computer - thousands of songs over the years. I have been trying to play some songs I bought while living in Japan in 2014. When I inspect the info of the song shown in finder it is shown as "protected MPEG-4 audio"

Apple got rid of DRM on iTunes Store music in 2009. They launched the Apple Music subscription service (which uses DRM on "offline listening" songs) in 2015. So if these files have dates in 2014, I wonder what kind of DRMed files (iTunes Store purchases, offline listening copies of subscription songs) they might be, and what happened to cause them to wind up with a 2014 date.

In any case, if you believe that these are purchased tracks, and they don't show up in your purchased list, it would be a bad idea to delete your only copies, and try to re-download them. The most likely outcome would be deleting your only copies, forever.

You could try making backups of these files on two or more external drives before doing anything rash, and indeed, if these songs are not available for re-download, you'd want backups anyway, in case you lost the originals to some disaster (drive failure, theft, fire, etc.).

kangayou Author

Level 1 (4 points)

Oct 16, 2026 4:14 PM in response to Servant of Cats

Thank you for your reply. The files are on my computer and have a created date of 2014. I lived in Japan from 1996 so when I moved them to a new computer maybe they came across on that date and that is why they are showing up as that date. Anyways, I know I bought them and am miffed that I can't play them. Really disappointing. Guess I'll just get a copy of them somewhere else - I paid once, and I'm not paying again because Apple had a penchant for this kind of locking things down in the past.

Originally posted at discussions.apple.com/thread/256376881