HomePod can't find songs or artists or playlists, but can "play all songs shuffled"

Same issue, 30k songs in iTunes Match and also Apple music. Turning off voice recognition seems to have solved it for now, though the toggle switch” for “update listening history” became disabled for me without recognition, but necessarily enabled for the other user (despite having recognition turned off). I turned on voice recognition, toggled update listening history on, and then turned off recognition and those settings “stuck”, though I’ve no real faith in it at the moment.

Can't be a ploy to get you to buy Apple Music. My wife has the same problem with only one of our HomePods and we subscribe to apple music. She asked for Xmas music and got the "can't find anything that matches your request" response. She tried many times with the same result. She went to a HomePod in another room and it worked fine. I tried the same request on the errant HomePod and it worked. We have a very large music library in iTunes/Music but I have yet to ask Siri to access it.

Haha - ok, good to know, but sorry to hear that your family is also having problems; very frustrating. As others have suggested, I have created a massive playlist of holiday music and Siri seems to be able to play that just fine (but still can’t find much else!)

I’m having the same issue but I’ve never had iTunes Match. I’m planning on resetting both Homepods. A restart didn’t fix it for me. I can stream music to them but if I ask it to play something the only thing it can do is shuffle my whole library.

Same story, siri can play random music or shuffle from my library but when I ask it to play a specific album or composer it says it can't find it or see it. My Home app shows that my os is up to date. Tried unplugging the homepod and resetting but makes no difference.

Just ran the 13.3 update on both my HomePods. Hasn’t fixed this problem. And I’ve just been charged for my annual iTunes Match description despite the fact that it is useless on HomePod in the current situation. This is deeply annoying...

So I recently talked to Apple again and the direction they are going to take is that they will stop supporting Apple Match with the HomePods and only Apple Music subscriptions. So if you have Apple Match and want to use your HomePods to play music successfully you will have to do it by connecting it to an iPhone/iPad/Mac and use the HomePods as speakers. I asked and they have not determined when they will make this announcement.

Wow - that’s what I suspected- thanks for confirming. I’ll be polite and just say “darn!” No point in subscribing to iTunes Match now and I’ll never subscribe to Apple Music (I have a Sony HD Walkman with all my uncompressed songs on it) and wireless streaming from a device or computer in my house drops out from time to time, which is very annoying. I’m likely going to add an input jack to each so I can at least use them as hardwired speakers off my computer. They’re big paperweights at this point anyway.

Agree with that. I specifically researched online whether being iTunes Match customer whether it could seek out my songs and playlists. Or else I wouldn’t of purchased. And it has been working fine in tandem with personal requests until HomePod os 13. This voice recognition thing has hosed things right up. I shouldn’t have to keep turning it on and off to fulfil certain tasks.

Apple has not kept its side of the bargain whether it be intentional or unintentional. If it is a bug then it should of been fixed by now and given the high priority it deserves

Any ideas on where to go from here? I could try using Doug’s AppleScripts and create a playlist per album (or even a playlist for each song), as HomePod doesn’t seem to have issues finding playlists. If Apple drops iTunes Match support permanently, they should rename the HomePod as the “Apple Music Speaker”! Agree completely that it’s a serious “bait-and-switch” change in functionality on the part of Apple.

I notice inconsistency for some reason in recognizing songs that I have purchased from Apple. I am not an Apple Music subscriber. Sometimes I will ask "Siri play Aron Wright" and my HomePods will tell me "You don't have anything by Aron Wright in your music". However, right now if I say "Siri play Aron Wright" she does start playing a song by Aron Wright; however, if I say "Hey Siri play songs by Aron Wright" I will get the response "You don't have anything by Aron Wright in your music". So at the end of the day if you ever want to use a playlist or want consistent HomePod performance connect to it using it as a speaker via AirPlay using an iOS device or Mac.

I’ve noticed that “weirdness” as well - not finding songs and artists, but I thought playlists were ok. For example, “Hey Siri, play a playlist.” <<Which playlist did you want me to play?>> “Baked Alaska” <<OK, now playing Baked Alaska>> Then my holiday music playlist plays normally. I can even ask Siri to shuffle the songs. Yesterday, I tried some experiments, which were sort of inconclusive. It seems the more “unique” the name of a song or artist, the better the chance of Siri “finding” it. For example, “Hey Siri, play ‘Love Games’” <<OK, now playing “Never Going Back Again”, by Fleetwood Mac.>> Me: ??? Then I asked, “Hey Siri, play ‘Take me to the Mardi Gras’ “ and the song plays normally. Can’t add the artist name to any play request though or Siri will be sure to indicate that you don’t have that song/artist. Maybe I’ll make my money back my monetizing a video of some creative way of destroying this formerly excellent, but now useless and frustrating device (x2).

I once was a software engineer and would love to see behind Apple's code. At first I thought the issue was with voice recognition; however, the HomePod will not be able to recognize certain songs/artists/albums consistently, while my iPhone will. I would assume even if the HomePod does not run off of an iOS, it would at least have the same voice recognition capability as devices that run off of the iOS platform. I still scratch my head over this and would love to be a fly on the wall at Apple where this is designed and developed.

From what I’ve read, the HomePod runs an iOS variant, but Siri capabilities already vary between Apple devices by design, such as the iPhone, Apple TV, and (of course) the HomePod. A few months ago, I came across a site that ran detailed Siri tests on all supported devices to see what you can (and can’t) do on each device. Capabilities varied widely, but with an A8 processor and 16GB of ram, there’s no practical reason why the HomePod Siri couldn’t be as full-featured as the iPhone. The fact that someone at Apple support mentioned that they are removing iTunes Match on the HomePod pretty much explains why we’re having so much difficulty.

I did a hard reset Homepod today on iOS13.3 and it did fix the problem. I can ask it to play every song I want again.

At first after the reset it didn't seem to work properly because I didn't show up in the Airplay menus on my other devices and had also some other problems. After I unplugged it, plugged it in again and left it for 5 min, everything worked fine except one thing; when I ask Homepod Siri where my iPhone is, it now uses an other Siri voice but I does what it has to do and that is locating my iPhone.

P.s. delete/remove Homepod from Homekit first! Then start reinstalling from scratch..