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.

Thank you 🙏🏼 This may well have fixed it for me. Memory usage has remained low, and so has CPU usage.

Artwork comes and goes at the whim of AMPArtworkAgent I guess, but I don’t actually care all that much about album artwork on my Mac. I open the Music app and start my heavy rotation playlist, then Hide the window. I hardly ever look at artwork in the first place.

Hopefully this means Music stops modifying hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, filling up my Time Machine. I’m fine with waiting for a proper fix whenever it comes, as long as my Mac is usable until then.

In the meantime, I may also try reinstalling Catalina in place.

Having the same problem - Music app will not stop "Loading artwork" and it is using almost 50 % of my CPU and a lot of memory (3 GB, and growing).

Any ideas or help would be appreciated. I have just one 8,000 albums and 45,000 songs.

TIA

Same issue as well. I'm stuck on "loading artwork". Only 120 out of roughly 800 album cover's artwork has loaded on my 2017 iMac. Thank goodness this Mac is only used to host my music with only 8 GBs of RAM with 4+ GBs used by Music this could take quite awhile to complete. Music is consuming 42% of my CPU right now. It's basically unusable with constant beachballs if you try and execute any other commands or use other apps.

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.

Same problem here. Music is constantly grabbing all the memory it can get its hands on and I've had to pull the plug on it a couple of times when its got up to around 50GB as it's used all the physical memory (16GB) and is ravenously grabbing more and making the whole Mac unusable. Automatically update artwork is unchecked and it's not making the slightest bit of difference. Everything else with Catalina has gone really smoothly, but Music is currently pretty much unusable.

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.

I'm no better off than last night. A handful of artwork has downloaded but 85% or more is still missing. As soon as I open the Music interface memory usage hits 7GBs of my 8GBs of RAM and the UI still hangs at "loading artwork"

The only thing good I can say right now is my iMac didn't crash today like yesterday but it's not usable.

I had good progress during the night since roughly 10.000 songs got their artwork (through Energy Saver I prevented the hard disk to sleep). To my surprise, Get Album Artwork got almost 500 additional. It appears it's over and the balance is 2.000 artworks missing.

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.

What was hanging and eating memory hand over fist last night was accomplished in about five minutes this morning via the Music>File>Library>Get Album Artwork route, and looking at the activity monitor it was churning through the artwork at good speed. Not sure if something changed server-side or what, but for the moment all seems to be well. Which is nice...