music app draining battery with iphone 11, ios 13.5.1

I have an iPhone 11 Pro (7 months old). IOS v 13.5.1. In just the past few days, the Apple Music app has started sucking the life out of my battery. Today, after fulling charging the battery, and using my phone minimally, the battery was down to 25% after 6 hours. The Battery stats page shows that the Music app background activity had used 81% of that.

Since this started happening, I have restarted the Music app, rebooted the phone, uninstalled & re-installed the music app (which also uninstalled all my music). I am not currently playing or downloading any music; but the problem persists. I did not make any significant changes to my phone prior to this happening (although automatic app update is enabled).

iPhone 11 Pro

Posted on Jul 6, 2020 3:58 PM

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Posted on Jul 8, 2020 10:41 AM

Just came off the phone to Apple support. Engineering suggested to make sure that automatic date and time was on. I remembered that in my privacy settings I had toggled off Setting Time Zone years ago. I logged out of the iTunes and app stores, toggled it back on, rebooted the phone, logged back into iTunes and turned sync on and now everything is downloading perfectly.


I’ll keep an eye on the background battery drain as that was a massive issue but it seems to have fixed it.


Since I’ve done this my phone is back to normal - no excessive background activity draining the battery.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 8, 2020 10:41 AM in response to Folsom

Just came off the phone to Apple support. Engineering suggested to make sure that automatic date and time was on. I remembered that in my privacy settings I had toggled off Setting Time Zone years ago. I logged out of the iTunes and app stores, toggled it back on, rebooted the phone, logged back into iTunes and turned sync on and now everything is downloading perfectly.


I’ll keep an eye on the background battery drain as that was a massive issue but it seems to have fixed it.


Since I’ve done this my phone is back to normal - no excessive background activity draining the battery.


Jul 8, 2020 4:43 AM in response to Folsom

My issue is now resolved.

After deleting the music app, I reinstalled it and then went to the Music settings. I turned off Show Apple Music and then went into the music app which now showed no music. I also removed my downloads too. I then went back into the music settings and re enabled Show Apple Music and then enabled Sync library.

The music app is not drawing battery any more.

Jul 7, 2020 5:42 AM in response to Paul Roberts1

Since the Music app was still 100% active in the background all night (even after I deleted it) I have signed out of iTunes and app stores on the phone, now the background battery drain has stopped. As you can see Music (recently deleted app) was draining the battery all night. I signed out of iTunes and App stores at 7am and now the battery is normal again - although I have no Music app which isn't great. This is also the case on my work iPad so it is affecting my 3 iPads and iPhone.

Jul 7, 2020 5:55 PM in response to JavierCad

After 12 hours, I decided reset my iphone complety, I installed all applications again because I tried restores and was a really mess, I believed the problem on my case is because the Music APP is running and trying syncronized music on the apple watch, is leaving in a infinity loop draining the battery in less 4 hours.


The health of the my battery is 100% that is the only issue I noticed.


Jul 13, 2020 8:12 AM in response to Folsom

I had this same problem with my iphone7 that is less than a year old. My battery would be drained to 10% before 11am after charging to 100% overnight. I went to Settings>Battery and it said that >75% of my battery was being used by the Music App for "background activity". After reading several troubleshooting posts, I figured out it was due to the fact that I used to have an Apple Music subscription (I did the 3 month trial), but I recently cancelled the subscription. This was causing my iphone to constantly try and sync my library to apple music even though i no longer had a subscription, so it would just try to sync, fail, and repeat for eternity causing my battery to drain.


To fix this, go to Settings>Music and TURN OFF the "Sync Music Library" option. This should stop the constant process of trying to sync and failing. If you go back into Settings>Music you will see that the "Sync Music Library" option isn't even there anymore! meaning that this is a bug in IOS as this option should no longer be activated if you cancel an apple music subscription, but for some reason it stays ON and constantly drains your battery from trying to constantly update a library that no longer exists without your subscription to Apple Music.

Jul 17, 2020 6:44 PM in response to Folsom

So my music app is draining my battery as well, although I was not listening to music. I am not super tech savvy, but I turned my background app refresh to Wi-Fi only, , but you could probably just turn it off altogether if you want, logged off of iTunes, then logged back on, powered off my phone, then powered it back on and 24 hrs later checked my battery usage and my music app used 0 battery life, great! BUT the “Garage Band” app suddenly used 45% of the battery life! Don’t even know what that app is and I’ve never used it, so I deleted it. Hopefully that is the end of this problem

Jul 7, 2020 8:55 AM in response to Folsom

I have same issue apparently the apple music app is running on backgorund, due that is trying syncronize the music to the apple watch, that is on my case, on the apple watch app this created a "sub-list" with the most playlist that you are listening (Almost 4 playlist). but never syncronize with the watch and the application leave running on the back the process generating a high consume of the battery. I tried disable this sync but doesnt worked.


Jul 8, 2020 10:36 AM in response to Folsom

I have been having the same issue since Thursday (7/2/2020). The Apple Music app had (17 h 33 m) running in the background. Since Thursday, it has run (23 h 25 m), (17 h 22 m), (20 h 20 m), (21 h), (21 h 45 m), and so far today (7 h 55 m, it is currently 12:35 pm) all in the background. I deleted this app days ago and it is still destroying my battery life. I fear that with this amount of drainage and recharging, my battery is going to have permanent issues.

Jul 8, 2020 11:38 AM in response to Paul Roberts1

Same problem started for me this 4th of July weekend. Both iPad Pro and iPhone 8+ are bogging down and draining battery very quickly - 100% to 20% in less than 3 hours. Devices are getting very hot too - not safe. Apple Music has used 18+ hours of battery in The background.

Turned off the show Apple Music and quit the downloads that were not downloading.

Closed all apps and restarted devices several times to no avail.

Not looking forward to deleting music app and re-downloading the 70+ gb of music I have on my devices.

C’mon Apple, there’s got to be a better way.

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music app draining battery with iphone 11, ios 13.5.1

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