Joining iTunes match wiped out all lyrics and data for Apple-purchased songs...so frustrating!!!

Good god, such a nightmare...so I got a new iPhone 15 about a year ago, magically (and disturbingly) the album artwork on most of my 9,000 or so songs was wrong (though, oddly, it was wrong but usually albums released the same year, e.g. R.E.M.'s Out Of Time would be Rush's Roll The Bones, or whatever...)

After a year of being annoyed by this (or hoping that it would magically fix itself with subsequent syncs to the iTunes library on my desktop computer, where of course all the album art is correct, or perhaps in

subsequent IOS updates), I finally decided to reach out to Apple (a choice I totally regret now, given what's happened since) after the latest 18.1 upgrade did nothing to fix it.

So, the first guy was sorry and tried to help, after a few feeble attempts (stuff I'd of course already tried), he suggested I delete the Music app from my phone, re-install, then sync my music again. Because this would of course take hours, I did not stay in the chat with him, but thanked him and hoped/assumed it would work.

Well, on the plus side, now all the album art was correct. But I had more than 9,100 songs in my iTunes library, and now there were only about 8,600 on my phone. Oddly, all the 2024 albums I'd added were gone, but then a bunch of random songs as well (e.g. Black Sabbath Master Of Reality only had six of its eight songs).

So I reached out again the next day...the person I chatted with this time, realizing he was out of his league I guess, put me on the phone with someone. After trying a bunch of stuff with her, none of which worked of course, she finally said I had to either join Apple Music ($12 a month) or do iTunes Match ($25 for a year) to fix the syncing problem. After researching both options, I didn't see the value in Apple Music but at

this point figured paying $25 to fix my problem was worth it, so I (foolishly, in hindsight) did iTunes Match.

Well, this whole process takes hours, so I let it grind through its thing supposedly uploading all the stuff from my library to the cloud or whatever. I open iTunes the next day...and all 1,000 or so songs I've

bought from Apple (the other 8,000 or so were ripped from my CD collection for the most part, some were downloads through other services such as Nugs) were ruined...I've spent hours putting in lyrics, changing data such as year, album title, not to mention I sort by last name and now all my Izzy Stradlin and David Gray and what have you are sorting improperly, not to mention all the play counts for these songs

are wiped off (yet magically the "last played" dates are still there).

In other words, they left "my" songs alone (thank god) in terms of lyrics and data, but all I'd purchased from them they were just giving me exactly as I'd purchased, i.e. whatever generic version they have. So I either go back and manually fix them all, a tedious and time-consuming process, or I live with this crummy version of my library that I've carefully curated for almost 20 years.

I know this is music-nerd, first-world problem stuff, but it is just so annoying, given how long I've been a customer, how much money I've spent (on both phones and songs), and most of all the fact that I'm only in this bad place because when I got my new iPhone a year ago Apple messed up all my album art in the first place, leading me down this road of "fixes" that keep making things worse and worse.

I realize I'm pretty much just venting, certainly if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this I'd be most grateful, but I fear that this subset of my music library is ruined forever and I'm doomed to either try to fix it all again manually or just live with it, neither of which makes me happy in the least.