Without Match, how to remove songs from the cloud

You say you have iTunes Match? What I understand from your question is that you want to edit your playlists adding/deleting or you just want to pick specific playlists to have on your iPhone, I'll explain both.

If you deleted a song from your playlist simply scroll up or down till you see edit/clear/delete. Hit edit then the + icon to add songs, or readd them if you deleted them. Clear will delete all the songs in that playlist without deleting the playlist itself. Delete will delete all the songs and the playlist itself.

If you're hoping to be able to add a couple of playlists for example a" work out" playlist and a "commute" playlist on your phone but leave the "dance" playlist on your computer, you can't. The whole idea of iTunes Match is that you have ALL of your music, playlist and whatnot. The idea is that when you make any change even if it's just moving a song from the bottom to the top of your playlist, it will show up on all your devices.

I hope that helps let me know if it doesn't and I'll try and help out if I can!

Danny

I think the difference is in the second paragraph that you posted. In your situation, if you have bought less then 7,000 songs from iTunes, then the rest counts against the storage.

In other words, it looks to me that only the songs that you bought from the iTunes store will not count against your 25,000 song limit. All other songs will (whether bought from somewhere such as Amazon, or ripped from a cd) likely count against that limit.

Keep in mind that you can have more than one Apple ID with purchased music in a library and according to the FAQ - only the Apple ID paying for iTunes Match/Apple Music is exempted from the 25k song limit.

It's not clear whether Family Sharing is all considered "one Apple ID" so you might want to be sure you re-download all family songs under your Apple ID if you are running up against a limit.