Apple Music "loading artwork" for hours and using virtually all of my system memory

I might have found a solution: Delete the “Album Artwork” folder inside your User/Music/iTunes folder. I did this and now the Music app is no longer using lots of system memory (In my case is now around 250-300 MB, after taking almost 8 GB in less than 15 minutes). Hope this helps.

Apparently when you upgrade from Mojave it tries to import the iTunes artwork library. Just delete that folder and you’re good to go. After deleting it, I reloaded Music and all my album covers were still there.

Following up: *after* deleting the Album Artwork folder, I tried File -> Library -> Get Album Artwork again, and this time it ran easily a hundred times as quickly as it had done before.

The downside: Apple's new album-cover system appears to be *terrible*. It's missing artwork from an astonishing number of albums, many of them top-ten hits (seriously -- missing the Bangles? Barenaked Ladies? The Beatles? really?), and it got some of them comically, embarrassingly wrong. This is not new-and-advanced tech: it's a major step backwards from where the state of the art has been for more than a decade...

UPDATE : I remoted into my iMac mentioned in my last post just to check it and noticed it had crashed and restarted after running out of resources. I found the Music app running but minimized so restarted my Mac with the switch thrown to relaunch apps after a restart (Music is the only app that I kept running) and noticed after the restart my CPU usage was down to 4% and memory was topping out at a comfortable 3.38 GBs.

After logging in after the restart, any app I try to open now responds instantly. If you're running out of horsepower like I was trying to load artwork you might want to try closing Music's open window (don't quit Music) and then perform a restart with Music set to launch after the restart. Don't maximize the Music UI after the restart, just make sure it's running indicated by the black dot under its icon in the dock.

Hopefully it will keep your Mac online and loading artwork without taxing the kernel and hardware and speed up artwork loading overnight. I'll report back tomorrow night with results.

Sorry, mistyped in my excitement.

In the main window of Apple Music you get a pop up at the bottom of the left hand column whenever it's got any processes underway. This has said 'Loading album artwork' and when you clicked through to the pop up box that was all it said too; no discernible activity. Click through this morning after doing the Music>File>Library>Get Album Artwork thing and all of a sudden there was a progress wheel and a rapid countdown as it churns through several thousand pieces of artwork.

Been running Music for over an hour now since and it's being very well behaved in a mere 430 MB of memory.

Only other thing to mention is I had restarted overnight so maybe the old 'turn it off and turn it on again' routine managed some sort of reset somewhere.

Good luck, hope it works for you. And as a Plan B and temporary workaround if it doesn't, it might be worth checking out the web-browser beta at https://beta.music.apple.com; that's what I did yesterday evening to get some music going.

The issue has been resolved for me. After days of trying to fix it i found this thread. I did the "File > Libary > Get Album Artwork" and a separate activity down in the left corner started. On that one - the clock started ticking. The "geting artwork" was still in limbo. I left it over night and now the CPU is down to normal 0,3. Both activity's is now gone. I can now close MUSIC as normal and not force quit it when it got stuck. It managed to get at least 90% of my album covers. The rest ill have to manage by my own again.

Just made a separate playlist named "Missing artwork" (Match > All media > Album Artwork > is False). There are some artwork there to recover from other songs. And the rest I have to hunt down manually from my backup.

FINALLY I also manage to sync my devices!

However. There seem to be some big issues with the MUSIC program. I do belive there shall be a clock on the side while the connected devices are being synced. Otherwise there shall be an eject button. None of them can bee seen. But in FINDER it works like normal.

The other thing is the shuffle button. One don't see if it's pressed ore not. I need to have the "Up Next" window open to see if it has been toggled.

The REMOTE app on my devices still don't respond to MUSIC. I can go in the the library and see my files, but I don't see whats playing ore can manage the music from the app. It also present my Playlist with allot of duplicates.

Anyone here experience the same problem with the REMOTE app and got it up and running with MUSIC again?

same issue here. i followed the consensus here of File>Library>Get Album Artwork and it literally took a few minutes to load over 6700 albums' worth of artwork.

I have had this issue too. I downloaded and installed Catalina earlier today and noticed at once an unusual memory usage while exploring the new music app.

The Music app increasingly used memory resources while I left it crunching through the album artwork updates. I returned to the computer some 30 minutes later only to be unable to exit the screensaver. My iMac (2018) crashed and the Music app started to hog resources upon restart almost straight away. I let it build up to 31.68GB of memory and just caught it before the Mac crashed again. A quick search online led me to this and other posts regarding the issue -- it appears to be quite common.

I have followed all of the suggestions listed above:

Deleting the Artwork folder in the iTunes folder,

Music>File>Library>Get Album Artwork,

Rebooting after artwork downloaded,

Open Music in safe mode.

Forcing Music to get artwork manually did seem to have helped (or, at least, some of the above measures seems to have helped) I can tell you that the Music app is still hogging 12GB of memory, but that there is no more 'loading artwork' loop -- least not at the moment!

I have also noticed that the Music app seems to spend a very long time 'checking music library' before it actually opens -- I am not sure if this is a related matter or not. I was unable to close my Music app, though, when it had finished crunching the artwork manually. Though it operated an used 12GB of memory, I had to force quit the app and then restart the computer because it became stuck in the relaunch. I shall report back with info on whether the above worked after the second restart!

Good tip on the get album artwork... after Music CHEWING up my CPU % for days I did that.. then I clicked on the "activity in process" at the bottom left of Music.... another widow came up and it says "loading artwork...' at top... not sure.. but now I see "Processing Album Artwork" and it is keeping a tally out of my 14k+ albums ... so at least I've got something going on now!

dear god both the iOS and the OS have been the worst rollouts i've ever experienced (every one since 2001)

If you hold Command and Option before launching Music it will open in "Safe Mode". I've noticed when I open it that way it doesn't show that perpetual "Loading Artwork" activity. Not a solution per se but a workaround until Apple fixes this issue.

UPDATE:

So I tried to launch Music after I had had to force quit it post manually getting the artwork and it wouldn't get past the 'checking iTunes library' part. Restarting the computer did not help either.

I messed around with a few things, such as trying to close the Music app through terminal, but I eventually resorted to a Recovery Mode OS Update. Since I have done this, the Music app has played a bit more nicely -- that is to say, it is not loading artwork and not hogging much memory (though I have seen the app run up to about 4GB -- which is beyond where I would expect it to run).

With all the above said, and knowing that this thread is about memory hogging due to album artwork updating, I should note that I do not have any artwork -- nor way to show album artwork -- on the Music app. That is to say that, if I highlight the 'songs' tab on the sidebar, I no-longer have the album covers that used to display with iTunes. I am assuming this is a feature of the new Music app, but I do miss seeing the album covers displaying with the lists of songs (I still get the small album cover showing next to the title bar at the top of the page). this is not an improvement.

Someone mentioned above that they long for the Halcyon days of Snow Leopard.... I am with them.

Thanks for the tip Jamie. I was just about to post that I rebooted my iMac, then opened Music and clicked Music>File>Library>Get Album Artwork and instantly 60% of my album covers appeared.

I'll change Energy Saver to keep my hard drive alive and see if the rest comes in by tomorrow night.

Highlight a few albums, select all, then right click and add album artwork.

This will shift through what is available very fast, and may reduce the amount of memory hogging you have while using...

Same problem. I have around 95000 songs in my library, the vast majority not iTunes downloads. Encountered same issue of the Music app hogging system resources and making anything else impossible on my iMac (2018 model). Left it running overnight, woke up to find the system had crashed and rebooted :( Loaded a Stats app to monitor memory/CPU load and closed the app window but with app still running. Checked on memory load and it just keeps creeping slowly up and up. Nothing else is running. So it looks like the Music app is just continually accessing more RAM until it reaches the point where 1. anything else becomes unresponsive and 2. the entire system eventually crashes.

Result: I've dug out an old USB flash drive and am loading it up with a Mojave installer. Going to wipe Catalina and reinstall Mojave from a Time Machine backup.

What have I learned? Never again jump into a MacOS 'upgrade' until someone else has discovered the faults and Apple has ironed them out. So, uh, I guess always be at least one system behind 'the cutting edge'. Also, 'the cutting edge' is overrated. New is not always (is seldom?) better.