not available in this country or region

Half of my entire Apple Music Library has all of a sudden been grayed out and saying it is not available in my country. Tried to access the region and it was saying one or more Apple TV subscriptions must be canceled before I can change regions. They definitely screwed something up in this update.

Apple broke something here. It’s like the metadata they usually use to map to an actual song now maps to a song but it is saying it’s the wrong region. Multiple people saying the same thing now.

This is why if you go in and just search for that song you can play it just fine. But can’t if you go to your songs or a playlist.

Okay so not good news but I have a fix I tested and it’ll work but you need another user’s device or create a second ID on another device. They are saying the songs aren’t available and I pushed back a bit on it and she’s going to run it by their team again. It looks like it was dumb luck that it happened with the iOS16 release but for whatever reason all of those original albums the rights are gone from Apple Music. Maybe Apple just made a decision to drop those right since there are upgraded versions and they didn’t want to pay for both? I have no idea, but the fact that they are greyed out seems valid. The downstream effects were unintended consequences.

So here is the fix - and please test this on a couple songs with a test album first so you understand the steps and don’t blow up your library.

1. ⁠Send the playlist to another device, I used my wife’s but it has to be a device that doesn’t have you signed or signed in with a different Apple ID so you can actually send the playlist.

2. ⁠On the second device, the songs will automatically map to a current version of that song. I have no idea why we can’t just refresh the mapping on a device but you can’t.

3. ⁠Duplicate that playlist on the second device. While in the playlist hit the three dots in the upper right, click add to playlist, name the new playlist and create it.

4. ⁠Delete bad songs on the first device.

5. ⁠Send the playlist back to device one from device two. This will remap all the songs to whatever version is out there now and ignore the old mapping.

You’ll want to duplicate all the playlists first so you don’t lose songs on multiple playlists. Because as soon as you delete the songs they will drop from the playlist. Since they aren’t in your library. You can also remove step 3, but that’s kinda risky if something maps weird. It’s better to just duplicate.

If you have iTunes I would also make a playlist with all your songs to remap all the the other songs not in a playlist and do the same thing.

Sorry for the crap news. I think the real question is why there isn’t an option to refresh mapping on a song within Apple Music or iTunes.

Thanks for this good information!

It’s more than I got after 1.5 hours on the phone with tech support.

Half the songs on my playlists are now greyed out, and it does appear to be the older ones, many of which were ripped from CD’s. More and more are becoming unplayable, some minutes after listening to the playlist.

I hope that Apple corrects this soon. It takes a long, long time to rebuild hundreds of playlists.

If that’s what I have to do, I may as well start from scratch on Spotify.

This is definitely iOS 16 released; and resync and rebuild is only a temporary fix; i spent an hour with apple support this week trying to fix this, and like you i deleted and re-added. However, some songs are greyed out on the original album, so re-adding was pointless. After many, many hours rebuilding my playlists, this morning, many of the songs are grayed out again.

hardly any of the greyed out songs were “bought” on the old iTunes, and none were imported, this is all plain Apple Music data.

I've deleted and re-added, stopped music sync and resync’d, and i get similar result across my ipad and my iphone. This is clearly an issue with apple music, but the help desk seem to think not, and each time i call them i go through the same long winded checklist.

This morning, in the UK region, i lost songs by the cure, calvin harris, bruce Springsteen, Moby, Leonard Cohen, Daft Punk, Pet Shop Boys….. all were fine yesterday, and unsync/resync puts *some* of them back.

oh and the ones that are greyed out are different on my iPad and my iPhone, so and I’m clearly in the same region - with the same Apple ID!

i see spotify or tidal in my future at this rate….

So I talked to Apple support and it seems I had much better experience. I have a call back from one of their techs on Friday they need 48 hours to escalate. I know what is going on, I just don’t know what part of the code broke here. I can also replicate it so I think they’ll figure it out. If they fix it that’s a different story.

So here is what I have figured out without being able to actually look at the code.

• It’s something with iOS16. My Wife’s old phone has iOS15 and it will still work same playlist, same songs. On the iOS16 it’s won’t played those songs.
• It looks like its only songs that were moved to ITunes originally pre-apple music.
• The songs you had on ITunes pre Apple Music were never coded as your songs. So the file that is trying to be played within your playlists is an Apple Music song that is “not in your region”. It’s not your old song. If you move mp3s into iTunes, it converts them now into “matched” or “Uploaded”. Matched means it’s your song and there is a matching Apple Music song. Uploaded means it can’t find the song so it uploaded it.
• The easiest fix is to just move all the music you have saved on your computer back to iTunes. However, this will break all your playlists. It removes duplicates within ITunes, but the file will be gone within the playlist.
• Finally you’re screwed if Apple doesn’t fix it. Since APPLE is reading that it’s not your personally owned song, you can’t change the region for those songs. You have to find the current album and pull it in.

Joe M21,

Thanks for providing us those details and for attempting those steps. With all the detailed steps that were performed to isolate and troubleshoot this issue, we suggest to contact Apple Support through this link here: Apple Support

Kind regards.

You’re not actually understanding the problem. The songs may have been personal songs but they aren’t stored as personal songs, within iTunes. They were stored as Apple Music songs.

No one lost “their personal songs” they lost Apple Music songs. If you don’t think losing three to four thousand sounds as playable on Apple Music, but only if you’re on iOS16 not 15 I don’t know what to tell you.

I used a migration app to move my playlists to Tidal, and so far, I've been using that. Works well, has a CarPlay app, my DACs handle MQA, so the sound is easily as good as hi-res lossless, but there's many, many more hi-res tracks.

Obviously there's a cost, but I might drop Apple Music and recoup.

case: 101847004475

Greetings Joe M21, 

That does seem like an odd message when working with music you created and wasn’t purchased. So, let’s work to isolate the situation. If you are syncing your entire music library via Finder, what happens if you sync 10 songs? Do they remain grayed out and showing an error message? 

Next, do you have both devices using the same Apple ID? We understand the music is synced manually and not coming over via a sync service such as iCloud but we want to be sure, given the error message, that one device isn’t set for a different country/region than the other. 

On your iPhone, can you go to Settings > your name > Media & Purchases, sign out of your Apple ID and then back in. Then test again. 

Thanks. 

Joe M21, 

A few more questions, to help us learn more. How many songs/tracks are in the album? Are you syncing the album using either Finder (macOS Catalina and later) or iTunes (Windows and macOS Mojave and earlier). Are you able to tell us which app the music was created in? 

We’d like to continue isolating by having you create a new library file on your computer. Then upload an album or two to that library and sync it to your iPhone. To create a new library file. 

For iTunes on Windows - Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and launch iTunes.

For macOS: Hold down the Option key and launch Music or iTunes for Mac

You’ll be met with a screen to choose or create a library, in this case, we want to create one. Then please add just one or two albums. We don’t need your entire music library to test this issue and we say that only because it can take time to import a library if it contains a lot of music. 

Once imported, let’s sync with that new library and test playing on your iPhone. 

Thanks.