Yes, it’s piracy. But I don’t care. If the artist or iTunes won’t make a 2015 album available in my country then I’d use my apps & internet to acquire it. Fuck ‘em & feed ‘em Froot Loops.
Suffice to say, I now have Antti Martikainen’s Land of the Brave album in iTunes & it’s been matched on iCloud by iTunes Match.
Because the conversions I did were from YouTube videos, the bitrate was 125 kbps, not overly high. But this is where iTunes Match comes in: all 15 tracks have been matched by iTunes Match - at 256 kbps.
So I deleted the downloads & downloaded the higher bitrate ones from iTunes iCloud Music Library.