So I have been puzzling over this issue for MONTHS now. I have come back to search for an answer about every 2 weeks, finally found a response with a backdoor solution that worked for me, hope it works for you too:
If you go to:
settings >
then scroll up until you get a search bar, and enter “music downloads”, then go to the (music) settings page and turn off downloading automatically in Dolby Atmos, and also make your download Audio Quality setting “High” (but not lossless), and scroll down to the setting “Download in Dolby Atmos” and turn that off as well, it should play the song. Note that you’ll have to delete and re-download the track/album.
Sucks that Apple hasn’t offered a better solution, or come up with an official answer, or included this in a patch, and that this is an exclusion that affects audio quality. But honestly, I get it to an extent; sometimes audio codecs and whatever goes on code wise to make a song lossless, or Dolby Atmos quality, doesn’t play nice with other elements of a system, and it’s not a simple fix.
That said, I’m hoping Apple is still pursuing this issue and working to fix it for future iOS patches/releases.