What happens if you stop iTunes Match subscription

In late 2009, Apple bought LaLa.com, a site that did pretty much what present day iTunes Match does.

It analyzed tracks you already owned, and allowed you to stream the ones you already had on your hard drive.

The way the technology works is by analyzing the waveform of the music file and matching it to an existing database of known song digital audio fingerprints.

Obviously, that's way oversimplifying, but the basic idea of why you don't have to upload a lot of your library, as iTunes Match and formerly LaLa.com have an existing db of song "fingerprints."

I had the same problem with iOS 9. I mistakenly asked my iPhone to download 4,000 tunes and could not stop it. The apple genius (online chat) was not able to help me. I eventually found a solution:

1. Go to the Music app
2. You should have a grey bar monitoring the downloads near the top of the screen, tap on it
3. Here you can see all the downloads - do not manually try to cancel all the downloads one by one, this would take too much time
4. Scroll down until the end of the list
5. You should see the "cancel all downloads option there" (a shame: it should rather be visible on the top of the list)