Family sharing will not share iTunes Match. It will consolidate those subscriptions’ charges under the Family Sharing “organizers” credit card.
Under iOS 7 I used a single Apple ID for all 4 members of my family for:
- iCloud
- Photo Stream
- Find iPhone
- Contacts/Calendar
- iTunes/App Store
And different Apple IDs for:
- Mail/Notes/Reminders/etc.
- iMessage
- Facetime
- Find Friends
This allowed one Photo Stream to contain pictures from each device. Since we have Photo Stream syncing with iPhoto on our iMac, it meant we never had to “tether” to the mac to download photos (only videos). iPhoto on the iMac always contained all photos from all devices automagically. iPhoto will only sync with a single Photo Stream, so sharing the ID here was a must to get this working.
It also allowed all devices to show up and be managed under a single account for “Find my iPhone” and to see share all App Store purchase and allow iTunes Match on all devices. Finally it allowed contacts and calendars to be shared on all devices.
In iOS 8 and Family Sharing, there is no way (that I have discovered yet) to get something similar. You can now get devices under different IDs to show up under a single “Find iPhone” account as well as share purchases. But iTunes Match does not get shared.
Also in setting up everyone up under individual iCloud IDs, the shared photo stream syncing to the iMac is no longer possible because the Photo Streams are tied to the iCloud account and iPhoto will only sync with a single stream. I hope multiple streams are supported when the new Photos app is released next year, but in the mean time :-(.
In addition I can’t just use the same set up I had in iOS 7 (all using the same Apple ID) because whereas iOS 7 allowed you to enter whatever ID you wanted to log into Find Friends, in iOS 8 Find Friends now uses the iCloud account info. So if I used the same setup I had in iOS 7, I would only see 1 person in find friends. I believe it would show the device that most recently was the device to “Share my location from” in the iCloud Location Sharing setup. I believe everything else would behave like iOS 7.
So no matter what, updating to iOS 8 results in a trade-off/compromise of some sort… time to decide on the the lesser of the evils and pick.