I came to realize recently that 5 albums I had purchased in 2016 when they still sold them had vanished from my uploads. One was not available at all anymore on YouTube Music streaming, but altogether 5 different albums had vanished, so I went to war with their customer service (which was a special kind of hell in itself but I was determined), and successfully extracted a refund from them. (I went through my device files on both my current and old phones and they are not there either.) Despite the headache of fighting with them, after almost 3 weeks of the runaround I got 60 dollars back from them.

If this applies to you and you notice stuff is missing, check the contents of your uploads section of YTM against your purchases on your account on payment dot Google dot com, take screenshots of the receipts for anything missing, and file a support ticket. They will only give you Play store credits, but you can use them for books or TV or games or apps at least.

Don’t let fucking Google steal from you because they shamelessly will, and while this is not an unfamiliar tale in the world of streaming, at least don’t let them steal money from you altogether. I cancelled YTM as well although it’s no different than anything else, so I’ll go back to buying physical albums only from now on, which I really should have all along and am sorry I didn’t, but I got caught up in the novelty of streaming like anybody else has.

It might be worth checking your Apple Music/iTunes content as well although I seem to still retain all those files when I did use it years ago so not sure, but the actor Ron Perlman lost his whole music library to Apple once, so probably worth looking.