Why do songs become unavailable on Apple Music?

Quite frankly the second part of your answer is quite absurb. Suppose your in France, buy a bottle of wine, put it in your suitcase, and bring it home. Suddenly the bottles are recalled. Not because there is glass in the bottle, and not because the wine is poisoness, but instead simply because the maker of the wine decides they weren't paid enough by the stores that sold them.

Yes, I'd like to see the winery get you to return the bottle, especially if you already drank it.

Still Apple Music and iCloud, have sort of solved that problem. Paying for music, we can't listen to, is just another example of the music industries, and apples greedy hand.

I was able to fix the problem by simply re-sycing. The question remains, why did the problem inject itself? All of my songs were either ripped from CDs that I own or purchased from Amazon, completely unaffiliated with Apple. How do they have the right to disable music from my library?

Who cares if it's edited. I am synching the same song from my iTunes library (where it plays,) to my iPhone (where it doesn't.)

Also who cares if an artist retracted it? We have paid for the song. Suppose you buy a cake from a bakery in Sweden, and bring it home. The baker of the cake in Sweden cannot suddenly insist that no-one can enjoy there cake any longer.

I agree, this is an unacceptable customer experience. I’ve never had this issue before from music purchased through iTunes or CDs. Bought music today off iTunes and synched to my iPhone and only music from 2 of the 8 artists I had purchased played. Received the same error message as on this thread. I went into my iTunes settings on my phone and turned off automatic downloads for everything including music and then re-synched my phone with iTunes. Issue was resolved after this and was finally able to play the music on my phone.

This appears to be a bug with iTunes and Apple should be more forthcoming about at least providing resolution info for this known issue instead of directing users (customers) to figure it out for themselves through this support community.

OP and everyone else having this problem, I think I may have fixed it. I was having the same issue. The song is having an issue in how it saved to your library for some reason. I fixed it by doing the following:

Go to the Songs section of your Library.

Find the problem song and delete it from the library.

Re-add it to your library/any playlist.

It should now be playable.

I don't know why this happened, or how this song came to be saved in my library because I'd never actually added it. But lo and behold, it was there and causing the problem.

I am having this same issue and it's driving me nuts. I've NOT unsubscribed from Apple Music at all. I've had it constantly for about 3 years and there is no issue with my account. I've noticed the songs that it won't download to my phone, but will populate ( albeit grayed out and gives me the "cannot play in your country or region" error when I have NOT left the US or changed any of those settings) in the music app, are songs that are remixes of songs I've downloaded from the artist legally, but outside iTunes. The files are compatible, but what's weird is even older files I've never had issues with won't download to my phone.

The songs will play in iTunes just fine though. This is so irritating! I just want to play my music on my phone!

Music industry has nothing to do with it (other than being responsible for the Orwellian DMCA, the infrastructure for buffoonery like this). Exhibit A: voice memos that I recorded right on the iPad are greyed out and “not available in my country” they were recorded using the built-in microphone in this country. Exhibit B: I had the exact same tracks synced to my iphone as to my ipad, both running the same version of the OS; everything plays on the iphone, nothing plays on the ipad.

Thanks for responding. I've had this issue for about 3 years - it impacts 45 of my songs on my "top 100 songs of all time" playlist. Most of them were ripped from CDs I own ... and the other songs on those albums are never impacted. After digging into this one evening I noticed the "last modified" date on the impacted songs is later than the other songs on the album from which they came. Why does a later modified date or updated meta data cause the iphone to refuse to play a track? This seems like a bug in their copyright protection efforts.

Is your suggestion I need to delete those 45 songs and re-rip them from my CDs? Any idea as to which meta data field might trigger this bug? Thanks!

Yea. I just signed up for Apple Music, and I can’t play some of my songs I had ripped from cds I bought with the error that not available in my region. I can’t even replace those songs from Apple Music, because I can’t Dl those songs on my iPhone.

Could listen to them yesterday, then signed up for Apple Music.

I didn’t even sign up for Apple Music, never will pay for such a ridiculous thing, and I still have a similar issue. I was listening to iTunes on my IPhone, when a song just stopped playing on my iPhone. So I try to reopen iTunes. It has vanished, along wt 3500 of my songs.

I go into App Store, and learn that the iTunes app, is now called Apple Music. So I download it. I open it and most of my music has returned.

Still a couple hundred tracks now say out of country or region. Some of the music is obscure, but none of it is foreign. For example only 8 of the 13 Angus & Julia Stone tracks from their self titled Album will play. Yes there originally from Australia, but there now fairly we’ll known in the States, and why were 5 songs cut. There not singing Iraqi folk music. Still who cares if they are.

I downloaded the songs from my $1000 iMac. I’m not playing online using your goofy cloud., so why should being an out of the area song even matter. Jeeze!

Tracks on an older playlist may have been edited (possibly only the meta data or lyrics text) to a new version on Apple Music, thereby invalidating the old version. You can delete the old track from the list and add the new version from Search to update your playlist.

Tracks that were once available, may have been retracted by the artist or their record company, temporarily or permanently, for all regions or for selected regions. The availability of tracks can change over time.

This is just getting ridiculous. I just downloaded a compilation album and certain tracks were greyed out with this error. So I then search for the actual track from the artist and it plays fine. So it’s a bug nothing to do with artist rights or changing playlists. Below is what you get when you play Bill Withers - ain’t no sunshine.

And here it is playing from a bill withers search ..

I have this problem when I try to download music previously bought on iTunes on windows like a while ago, and I can’t download any of them to my iPhone, they just do that little loading thing it does.

I’m having this issue as well. In fact, I’m getting rather tired of seeing this on practically every single album I add. This is Vince Gill’s brand new album which I am available to purchase in my region but for some reason some of the songs are not available in my region? What is this? I’m not buying that some songs on the same album are available while some aren’t? What is it about those songs that cause it not to be available in certain regions? If they are protected by copyrights not available where I live, then wouldn’t the entire album be greyed out? I’m starting to think paying 15 bucks a month for limited music due to some shady dealings with no real explanations as to the reasons why then I think I’d rather save that 15 dollars. Even Spotify is the same. Some songs are available while others aren’t on albums. And I don’t understand why I’m able to buy this entire album and listen to every song in my region, but the songs, which I am paying for to listen to monthly, are not available to stream? Something tells me this is a ploy by these streaming services to get you to buy albums instead of streaming them.

One other concluding remark here,

I's like to reiterate that this is an IOS problem. Apple Music app on my Mac works fine - I have no problems beyond a few purchases expiring, but there's really not much anyone can do about that.

For me, it's the inability to download things despite them being synced on my iphone or ipad, despite those things already existing on the cloud (pre-purchased and synced) and being available and playable on Apple Music via subscription.

Previously itunes match-synced downloads can't be removed without being deleted from library altogether. It's like the bugs are getting worse and worse.

This image below is really typical - this Basement Jaxx album is available to stream on Apple Music, I had this problem because I owned the CD and old syncs needed to be fully removed from library to free up space, and now - from Apple Music - I can't re-add it and download despite paying a subscription service.

Other occasions, it just says things 'aren't available in your region'. No bug fixes seem to have been attempted at any stage - it's been like this for well over a year.