Rating songs with Siri stopped working (iOS 15.1.1 Music app, not service)

I contacted Apple Support, https://getsupport.apple.com/, selected my iPhone -> Apps and Features -> Topic not listed and described the issue as "iPhone, Siri no longer allows rating the currently playing song". Then I selected chat. I gave the rep a link to this community discussion and told her that others were having the same issue. After some back and forth, I asked if apple was aware of the issue. She finally said "I'd like to set a callback for you with a specialized department to report and try to solve your issue". I said yes! I got a call immediately from someone who was much more technically savvy. We discussed the issue and he reviewed this discussion. He said that the problem had not been reported to Apple and that they did not usually look for issues in the community discussions. He said he agreed that it was a back end problem and would submit a problem report to the developers. So, if everyone goes through the same exercise, it might help get this issue fixed.

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]

I did the same thing Webster, and the issue has again been lodged with engineering. Hopefully if enough people do this we’ll get a fix in a future update!

For anyone else who is keen to lodge this error, make sure you:

1. Advise this is occurring across multiple devices if you have them (which it is)
2. Advise that this also occurs on a friend or family member’s device so they can rule out your Apple ID as the issue (which it’s not)
3. Advise that you’ve already tried to restore your device to factory settings and the issue is still occurring, otherwise they’ll make you do that as part of the troubleshooting (even though they acknowledge this is probably a back-end issue).

Fingers crossed this gets sorted soon

Shortcuts can be used as a temporary measure:

Create five playlists and five shortcuts, name them from "rating one" to "rating five" and configure the action:

Get current song -> Add current song to variable -> Add variable to similar playlist.

On the way, order: "Hey Siri, rating three", and in the evening manually set ratings in the resulting playlists.

I could not figure out how to create the shortcuts correctly. (Shortcuts and I are not friends.) I would be very grateful if you could provide the actual steps for how to create one of the shortcuts; I got very confused).

But the following process did seem to work. First I created five different playlists titled "rating five," "rating four," and so forth. (Thanks for this suggestion.) Then I simply used the following syntax with Siri while listening to music.

“Hey Siri, Add Current Song to Playlist Rating Five” (or whatever rating I desire)

Then at the end of the day, I went into each of those playlists and actually rate the songs in those playlists.

I got some help with this over the phone as well and referenced this thread as part of the conversation. It seems like the star ratings feature was removed for Siri with the latest update (15.1.1) which is why we are no longer able to use the feature.

Hello Matt Tuley,

We see that you're having an issue with using Siri to rate your music. We'd be happy to help.

You've already done some great troubleshooting steps to help with this issue. Next, let's have you go to Settings > Siri & Search > Listen for "Hey Siri", and toggle this off, restart your iPhone and go back in and toggle that setting back on. Once you've toggle it back on, test to see if the issue remains.

If the issue remains, sign out and back in. Go to Settings > Tap on Your Name > Media & Purchases > Sign out. Once you're signed out, restart your device and go back to Settings > Tap on Your Name > Media & Purchases > and sign in.

*This step will temporarily remove any music you’ve saved for offline listening, you will have to redownload all the music saved for offline manually again.

If the issue persists, then you'll want to reach out to Apple Support for further assistance.

Get Support

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

The same problem started recently for me as well. This occurs on an iPhone 6 running IOS 12.5.4 and my iPhone 11 Pro running IOS 14.8. I was going to try updating to IOS 15 but apparently that doesn't work either. So it is definitely a problem that Apple has introduced on the Siri back office servers. I have a large music collection and I use Siri to rate songs while using CarPlay. If I don't want to hear a particular song anymore, I just ask Siri to rate the song as 1 star so that I can identify and delete it later from my music library on my computer. This has always worked for me until recently. Now Siri says "Sorry, I can't do that". There is no other way that I know of to easily and safely rate a song when you are driving. This needs to be fixed.

I have a theory as to why this issue exists. Like others on this thread, I've utilized the "rating playlist" workaround. It's mostly worked, with one exception: songs that I've uploaded to my library can no longer be added to playlists. I believe this issue and the song rating issue are both tied to the new Apple Music Voice plan.

For half the price of the regular Apple Music plan, the Voice plan provides Siri-only access to Apple Music. Aside from not having a GUI, it also doesn't have library or playlist capabilities. My guess is that there is an issue identifying the plan subscription, so all users are being treated as Voice plan subscribers.

Apple QA either didn't account for the standard Apple Music plan user persona and missed this defect or, they did, identified it, but management determined that they didn't have enough time to fix it prior to the Voice Plan launch. Regardless, either scenario reflects poorly on them. Hopefully this gets fixed in an update sooner than later

Well this is fun. The use 5 playlists idea partially works but there's definitely something weird going on. As an example, I created a playlist called "Rating 3" and a short cut as directed. If I then say "Hey Siri, Rating Three" it adds the current track to the playlist as expected but this does not sync back to Apple Music. If I say "Hey Siri, add this track to my rating three playlist" it adds the track and this DOES sync back to Apple Music. As an aside, I've found out the hard way that Siri on the Mac can't be used to add a track to a playlist. It pops up and error saying it can't add to playlists on this device. Wonderful.

This same problem started for me today. I probably rated 3 dozens songs in the last two days. I did a local pc iTunes sync today to update some playlists and afterward could no longer rate by saying “Siri give this song X stars”. I can still toggle the “love” flag with Siri though. Something must have changed on the Siri back end. Please fix this apple, it’s very useful while driving.

I hate to think that this is Apple's next attempt to discourage people from using star ratings after 2016, when star ratings were completely replaced by the "like/dislike" mechanism with the first release of iOS10.

Just adding my reply so that this topic has more comments. I'm using an iPhone 6s and IOS 14.8.1.

This behavior seems to effect any model iPhone and IOS release and is most definitely caused by Apple's backend changes.

PLEASE FIX THIS APPLE. I really hate when Apple makes a changes like this that hurt its users (which they do occasionally like when they decided that finder and spotlight would return metadata instead of filename when searching music)