haroblr

If you don’t renew the yearly $25 subscription, your iCloud store goes away. iTunes purchases will still be available to all devices, and anything that you have downloaded from iCloud to you devices you keep. This includes iTunes Plus versions you have chosen to replace older, lower quality rips in your main iTunes library. Apple explained that replacing those lower-quality rips is optional.

The bigest question amongst my tech obsessed friends is “What happens if you stop paying for iTunes Match”. This is what I suspected (hoped really) the answer might be.
The above quote show what i think is a very interesting loophole that, uncommonly, benefits end-users AND Apple.
In short, you can pay for Match, use it for a year and then quit and have ALL of your music ‘upgraded’ and on your machine(s). This is truly great for the consumer and makes it easy to ‘quit’ the cloud if you want to without losing any part of your collection.
How this is good for Apple is that even if you quit iCloud you get all the features of it for music you purchase from Apple. So you could pay for the year, quit, and just keep buying everything from iTunes. If you want to keep buying from Amazon (or pirating) and have the benefits of iCloud, then you’ll pay the $24.99. Which, I have to say, is dirt cheap considering i was very worried they would come out with a per song license cost.