Apple Music is SO SLOW

After a ton of troubleshooting, I was able to figure out what my problem was. As has been reported in other threads, iTunes and now Music sometime duplicate your playlists (without you doing anything). I had a folder for my "Smart" playlists. When I opened that folder to check, it had duplicated my dozen or so smart playlists into about 300 smart playlists. When I deleted this Smart Playlist folder, all of the performance problems went away!!!!!

This may not solve your problem, but it's worth a try. I recently worked with Apple Engineering because I had this same problem. Here is what we figured out. I have used iTunes/Music for years so I had lots of very old playlists some contained in playlist folders. iTunes had a problem for awhile of duplicating playlists. What had happened to me was that I had a playlist folder containing about 10 "Smart" playlists. The iTunes duplicating playlists bug had turned these 10 playlists into over 700 playlists. Since "Smart" playlists are rebuilt every time you open the app (either iTunes or Music), this caused a dramatic slow down of the app (making it virtually unusable). When I deleted these playlists and the folder containing them, the app instantly was responsive. I have been using Music on Catalina now for over a month with no issues whatsoever.

Again, I'm not sure if this is your problem, but it's worth checking into. Hope this helps you.

I have a massive library (106k tracks). Just upgraded from Mojave to Catalina and immediately met this problem - very, very , very slow or no scrolling when using the Songs view. I had about 20 playlists setup for various devices and also to export .csv listings of album + artist for the many genres I use to produce database listings. I deleted all these playlists (as they are very easily regenerated when I need them again) and BINGO! the music App on Catalina now works as fast as iTunes on Mojave did!

Finally, deleting most of my playlists has increased the speed dramatically !

Thanks for the trick ;)

Looks like Apple music is back to "mormal" state.

Shouldn't be, but you might try deleting them and rebuilding them. Just looking for a solution here. Apple Engineering is aware of this issue. For me the problem seems to have been caused by duplicated smart playlists (which get rebuilt every time you launch the Music app). Another hypothesis is that old smart playlists (created under previous versions of iTunes) my be causing some performance issues.

I had some older playlists, saved in 'Playlist Folders' and I removed the folders. Made a big difference, although I don't have any idea why. Another commenter previously mentioned removing older, legacy playlists and folders.

Can you give a few more details please. What kind of Mac, what version of MacOS, free space on your hard drive, etc.? My problem was that I had several “Smart” playlists in folders that got randomly duplicated by the system over time. Every time the Music app launches it tries to rebuild those playlists which took forever and made the Music app virtually unusable. So do you have any playlist folders? Do you have any “smart” playlists? They may be causing the problem, but I’m just speculating.

Update: My unresolved issue with apple music was escalated to an apple senior technician, I was in the phone with her. She connected to my computer, then she said that she want to replicate what I'm doing in her computer, so the first, second and third song played without problem, then I tried a search and apple music froze, the "See All" links didn't work, I couldn't ruj searches, I couldn't play more songs, but the interesting thing is that the apple technician said "Oh wait, it is not only you, I have two macs and both of my computers are having the same issue." He put me on hold, after maybe 20 minutes she came back and said, "the issues in my computers are resolved, it is not a widespread problem, we w'll call you back, to try to resolve the issue." They called me back, after being transferred three times I spoke to another senior technician who told me "we are aware of this problem, it is not only you, we are working on a new apple music update to solve this issue. There is nothing we can do it now."

It is so bad, but at least it gives me peace of mind that my computer is no the problem.

So, it seems that the new Catalina update messed up apple music desktop app.

It looks like the last Catalina update (10.15.6) released yesterday, has solved the issues with apple music desktop app. I'm trying it and no problems so far. Apple music running fast, "See All" link working, running searches working, and not freezing. I hope it keeps working like that.

As mentioned before, this is indeed a solution to wait until Big Sur and the new Music.

Remove all your playlists. You'll see that it goes back to normal speed.

Create them again (I thing it's better to have only a few playlists unfortunately).

If you have the duplicate playlist problem, they actually show up in both iTunes and the Music app. If you don't see duplicate playlists there then you don't have that problem. If you have any "smart" playlists I would delete those (and reconstruct if you want to). Also if you have playlist folders you may want to create new folders and move the playlists into those and delete the old folders (just in case).

A false dawn - it's not quite that simple. After about 30mins Music reverted to the slow behaviour. After removing some unused apps including those in the login list I tried to restart the iMac only to be told that this would stop Music searching for album cover art. So I left the machine running overnight. Now Music is back to running as fast as it did under Mojave. I think there is more to the initial slow performance than this though. I'm not really au fait with the detailed functioning of iTunes/Music but I suspect that my massive library was being re-catalogued (re-writing the .itl file?) which supports rapid searching.

Worth noting that in my case this was not really necessary as I store the entire iTunes folder structure as an entity on a separate disk to the system disc so my .itl file could be picked up. Changing the OS it is obviously best for Apple to assume this is not the case (I'm sure many users store just the media file elsewhere and leave the .itl file on the system disc with app).

Whatever...............I'm now a happy user!

Have you tried deleting all of your Smart Playlists?

Hey raz273,

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities! I understand you're running into an issue with the Apple Music performance your Mac. I definitely want to make sure you're able to enjoy Apple Music without any issues, and I'm happy to help.

I recommend checking out the resource below and working through the steps there to help with performance issues on the Mac.

If your Mac runs slowly

Thanks again, and have a great day!

I have a 4 week old MBP 16'', top spec: 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD, 2.4GHz i9, and I came here precisely from a search about this issue. I subscribe to Apple Music, and the app is just so laggy. Everything else runs butter smooth, but this app has some sort of performance issue. Even swiping left and right through spaces goes from butter smooth to janky when I swipe through the app in full screen. Moving the cursor within the app is visibly laggy. Playing or selecting a song is visibly laggy. There's clearly an issue with the app's performance, and it's not related to the Mac itself.