So here is the fix that worked for me:
(iOS 12.1.3, iPhone 5s)
- Since I had many voice memos stored on my iPhone and I was running out of storage I backed up the voice memos to my Mac and deleted the memos in the Voice Memos app. That cleared about 1.7GB of storage and after deleting the memos I had 13.7GB of storage left.
- I shut down my iPhone and restarted it.
- I then quit all apps, including Music, and reopened Music. I was greeted by a very welcome and long awaited view of beautiful album artworks.
So I suspect that the artworks didn't load because of the limited storage, to conserve space. Though the issue has been fixed now, I don't think it is a very nice user experience to have tried many methods of fixing this problem and not achieving any succes, but then after simply clearing up some memory resolving the problem. I would suggest Apple to add a simple dialog box in the Music app that states: "Album artwork is not shown to conserve storage" and giving two options: "Manage storage" and "Discard", or something like it. After the message is discarded it won't pop up anymore or just once in a (long) while.
Silent errors like these are making the experience of others and mine way worse than they could be! I am sure this problem is known to exist at Apple, because the mechanism behind it seems deliberate and is actually quite understandable. So an acknowledgement through a paragraph in the Apple Music/iTunes help page would at least be in order.
I really hope this will help some people out!
- Koen
