Non-purchased songs appear in fresh installation of iTunes

[jennyp]

I just did a clean install of El Capitan on my iMac. I come to set up iTunes. I sign into my store account and I see the songs I've purchased. But also listed as available for download are some of the songs and albums that I've added to iTunes in the past from CDs, and which I've never purchased from Apple. Yet there they are available for download.

Has anyone else experienced this? I don't use Apple Music or iTunes Match.

 

[jennyp]

Another weird thing is that, even before I've put ANY music (or anything) into iTunes, if I select "Check for available downloads..." under the Store menu, I get a dialog saying "All purchases have been downloaded for this Apple ID" - even though there's nothing whatsoever in my iTunes library yet!

 

[DeltaMac]

Do you have your backup drive connected (so that the songs in your backup are available to your Mac?)

 

[jennyp]

My backup drive isn't connected, no. I have the backed up files on my desktop while I'm sorting them out. But I've purchased none of these songs - they're all from CDs.

 

[Rigby]

Just to make sure: Are you sure you haven't subscribed to iTunes Match or Apple Music? Or perhaps you had in the past? I don't see any other explanation.

 

[jennyp]

No, I haven't subscribed to either, ever. I know, it's weird.

 

[DeltaMac]

My backup drive isn't connected, no. I have the backed up files on my desktop while I'm sorting them out. But I've purchased none of these songs - they're all from CDs.

So - you have purchased the songs, just not through iTunes. So the songs are not unfamiliar to you.
If you now have a completely fresh OS X install, then the only way that iTunes would know what music you should have, would be from your iCloud account, I suppose.