Play music on iPhone, does not update plays or last played on Apple Music for Mac

As of 12/20/23 after a recent OS update Music is still not syncing across my devices. Changes to Playlist titles change in real time but the songs don't update. Not to my iMac, iPad or iPhone. GRRRRRR! For me one of the most important features of belonging to Music is to have all my devices synced so the number of plays and last played date are the same. I can't quite understand why Apple does not resolve this.

For me, it is long, long way from being fixed. My playlists 'Under four' are different on Mac, iPad, iPhone and TV. However, a new quirk now is, the iPhone version only registering songs played while on my Wi-Fi at home, in the 'recently played' smart playlist back on the iMac. Check on Last.fm and yes, there is ALL the music I listened to, to and from work. And whaddayaknow?! In the Journal app, it invites me to write something under a section where, amongst other things, it lists ALL the music I listened to on my iPhone, walking in and out to work.

Let's face it, if Last.fm can get it right...

Mine seemed to work BRIEFLY on New Years Day but since then it is not working. It's not updating. Now today it seems to be working again, although the songs for my 'test' playlist are updating on my iPhone it still shows "Updated 3w ago" ... I'll keep monitoring it and posting here. Hope it's helpful to others, your posts are helpful to me.

I am having this same issue, not only with iPhone, but also with iPad. This is very frustrating because I use several dynamic "smart playlists" that are at least partly based on play counts or recent plays. Since a significant amount of listening is using CarPlay from my iPhone or from my iPad at home the playlists are no longer updating properly which is resulting in certain songs being played too often and others not enough.

Apple please fix this ASAP!

I am having the same issue. The play counts for songs on iPhone not syncing to Mac\Music. It stopped working for me last year some time (or before, judging from the play counts on my Mac). Quite annoying that this problem has been happening for many months now.

This still isn't working. My phone smart playlists are completely different than my Macs, and songs played on my phone take at lest 8 hours to show up on recently played, if at all. My legacy play counts in my Mac library don't seem to affect smart playlists on my phone.

I find that it eventually does update, but it may take days before it does so. My thinking is the this is probably suce a compute process, that Apple has not found a simple and elegant solution. It maybe works but ever so slowly.

I have an iPod classic (80gb) and the problem exists with me too. When I sync (plug my iPod into my MacBook) plays on my iPod are not recorded. This has only been happening since mid March but is very frustrating. Any suggestions.

At Apple Support's suggestion I updated my MacBook software to the latest version. Then I synced my iPod and hey presto recently played songs on my iPod appeared in iTunes! However when I looked at my playlists the sync process had unfavourited every song . I can't believe it. I had hundreds of songs favourited (with the heart) and now none are. Any suggestions

Reading the most recent comments, it seems that for some this issue is resolved. The last time my iPhone SE synced play counts to my Apple Music library was 9/23/23. I tried the methods again that were recently posted but my play counts still haven't updated. I'm almost certain the counts are stored on my phone, it's just so frustrating that after a decade of listening and syncing that this still isn't a resolved issue. I did contact Apple and gave them exact dates and screenshots, but it seems like they've known about this for a while. If anyone has a real solution please reach out! Thank you!!

This solution synced for two songs for me. And then it stopped. I also tried playing music from Home Sharing from my AppleTV. It also did not increase the play count. The funny thing is that Music on the mac **knows** that the song was played, it just does not increase the play count. Anyone from Apple able to tell me how to file a bug on this? Thank you.

Indeed. Apple is not going to fix this. I suspect their software architecture cannot easily accommodate updating play counts. Before Apple Music, with iTunes Play counts used to update by using an XML file that was transparent to the user. With apple music, everything goes through the cloud so they don’t know how to handle it, or don’t want to handle it.

the engineers erroneously think the Replay feature makes play counts redundant but it does not.

I still have not figured it out. I use Apple + and Music... so why all my devices are not the same puzzles me. I want the songs I play on my iPhone to be reflected on my Mac and MacBook. And of course my iPad. Any ideas are appreciated. Thx

I’m experiencing the same issue and it’s really annoying. May not be a big deal for most, but this is really bugging me.

any word from Apple on them addressing this issue?