Apple Music no longer shows album artwork on playlists

Yep. It’s really annoying. At present if I create a playlist in the Mac Apple Music app it still uses the artwork from the first four tracks to generate the playlist artwork. Even if you add the tracks on iPhone or iPad. I suspect a future update on Mac will switch it to the terrible iOS Music app behaviour.

I can think of no good reason to change it to work like this. 😡

Good news - IT IS SOLVED on both iPhone and Mac.

Process explanation:

1. iPhone: Music > Select song(s) > Add to a Playlist > New Playlist > Save the playlist. Done (so don’t even touch the image section)
2. Mac: Music > Select song(s) > Add to Playlist > New Playlist > when the playlist comes up, in the IMAGE section, click left to the most left “empty” image with a red + in it > select it > Save the playlist. The album image(s) appear in your playlist!

Hope this helps - it is not intuitive but works (I tried several scenarios and it works every time).

Please upvote my reply so others know it is solved, too.

In response to afgkelley and otherness2018: see my post of Feb 8th. If you have an existing playlist, in Music on Mac hit CMD-A to select all songs > Add to new Playlist and select the most left “empty” artwork tile with the red + in it. Should work.

This from Apple support. Report the problem through their support and feedback channels.

“Thank you for your patience. I have checked my resources here and I have found that the feature is still under review. I would request you to please keep an eye on the changes.

Apple engineers were aware with the feedback that was sent by our customers. For now, I would highly recommend to try the new features and see for any changes. I don't wanted to say that this is a trial and error, but, rest assured that they are working on it as you have mentioned that there are a lot of customer that is not happy with the changes.”

Yes Apple has not thought of the end user fully on that one - more than 70% of people are predominantly visual and as commendable as it is to pursue a great look to make the experience on Apple Music more pleasing they forgot that when having multiple playlists their lack of options render the experience less enjoyable as it makes it looking for a playlist less a visual experience where specific artwork pops out and more of a text experience where you scroll through alphabetically and then somewhere find a playlist that has assigned colours and no originality. Basically they have aligned with their design philosophy and broken away a little bit from what artistic expression brings forward to promote conformity. This also brings about considering changing platform quite naturally for anybody who creates their playlists and interacts with them more through images then text.

Submitted this feedback.

"A recent update to Apple Music on iOS changed how the artwork for a new Playlist is generated. Previously, a playlist would generate artwork by combining the artwork for the first four tracks in the playlist. Now, Apple Music on iOS uses a selection of abstract gradients for artwork on a new playlist. This is a backwards step. The previous behaviour was much better. At the very least, the old behaviour should be one of the options available to choose from."

Unfortunately, it's still not working for me on macOS. I created two separate playlists in Apple Music version 1.4.2.83 on macOS Sonoma 14.2.1, and both got blended gradient artwork. The colours were taken from the first four songs in the playlist. But it didn't show a grid of covers built using the track's artwork.

For what it's worth - I sent the following product feedback:

Please bring back album artwork on playlists! This is a step back - the previous version which took a sampling of albums from the playlist, was much more usable, because if the title didn't indicate what kind of music was in the playlist, the art would. Now the art is generic, and provides no value. It feels that often the changes you make aren't validated by people who actually use the product.

Thank you for posting that solution. That is working for me.

(I had responded to someone. Not sure why it posted with no context. I used the option of creating a playlist with albums in it, have the icon/artwork option all the way to the left but do not select anything manually, and it used the top 4 albums. This was in an already-created playlist and I had to select all tracks and create a duplicate/copy playlist. It would not work just by trying to edit the existing playlist.

I don’t think anyone from Apple reads these discussion groups. Submitting feedback via the official feedback links at Apple.com is the way to register displeasure with this change.

Anybody else worked on a playlist today?

Looks like album covers are back, so a big thanks to someone at Apple for listening to our pleas!

Now can someone look at default view option settings!

I clickedthe link on one of these posts for feedback here and filed my complaint. Please do the same. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

mfreud95 wrote:

please reimplement the album art on playlists.

Tell Apple:

Product Feedback - Apple

You have to report this through Apple product feedback. They aren’t paying attention to forums