My iPhone 15 Pro with iOS 17.1.2 has some of the music in my playlist showing the wrong album art

This problem has happened to me every time I have upgraded to a new iPhone for probably 10 years at least.

I use windows and here is the fix:

1. Start iTunes
2. Connect iPhone to computer
3. Select the iPhone in iTunes and go to Music
4. Uncheck (Turn off) "Sync Music"
5. Click "Apply" - this will remove all music from the iPhone
6. Close iTunes
7. Locate and DELETE the iTunes Album Artwork Cache directory (mine is here: C:\Users\[My User Name]\Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Cache
8. Disconnect phone from computer
9. REBOOT iPHONE!!!
10. Restart computer
11. Launch iTunes
12. Reconnect iPhone to computer
13. Select the iPhone in iTunes and turn "Sync Music" back on
14. Click "Apply" - this will put the music back on the iPhone
15. thank Apple for wasting your time by not fixing this bug for over 10 years

Apple is well aware of this problem but does nothing to fix it. They are aware because there are 5 or 6 questions about this same issue on this site every year.

I finally wrote down the solution and keep it handy because each time I have upgraded in the past, I have forgetten the solution by then and have to spend hours looking online for the solution all over again.

Maizo9 wrote:

My iPhone 15 Pro is running IOS 17.1.2 and a few days ago I noticed that some of the music in my playlist was showing the wrong album art. Interestingly enough the actual playlist artwork is correct but the individual entries are all messed up. In other words the Music DB seems to be corrupted. I must confess having a picture of JLo covering my Xmas playlist seems like little too much!!

Out of curiosity, were the tracks purchased from the iTunes Store, or imported manually?

(I've noticed that there has been some bug regarding Purchased albums displayed in Music since around iOS 17.1 - TBD whether it's been resolved in 17.1.2 - but this is an entirely different matter...)

If these are Purchased tracks, the album artwork typically isn't embedded in the file itself; it looks to an artwork cache file to display the album art. While one can access this cache in macOS to clear out (albeit, manually), in iOS it is embedded in the filesystem somewhere. In the event that the iOS artwork cache became corrupt, the only real way to rebuild that cache is to sign out of Media & Purchases and sign back in, and wait for iOS/iPadOS to rebuild its cache from your purchases.

However, I've found that manually adding the artwork to Purchased tracks (from macOS Music/iTunes) and then manually adding these songs/albums back onto the iOS device may help. By doing it this way, the album artwork is now contained within the song files' .m4a metadata, and not a link to some cached file.

I typically didn't see artwork becoming corrupted on tracks I added manually from a CD rip, as I added all album art to the files themselves. (there is an option in iTunes/Music "Get Album Artwork" for this, but again, that contacts Apple's artwork servers to populate the cache file as opposed to adding the artwork directly to the file's metadata)

Hope this helps.

They have been saying this for years and years and years like you say. “Gone away and come back?” Yeah right.

Unfortunately, the only solution is to remove all the music from the phone and put it back on. (Note- this is not a “restore” in the literal sense of restoring from a backup).

None of my music comes from the iTunes Store. All of it comes from albums I have purchased and ripped. I have over 600 GB of music, so it takes a long time to load all my music on my phone. Hours. I literally just went through this process today because I upgraded phones recently.

The only reason you would not be able to delete and reload your music onto your phone is if you somehow lost your iTunes library. But if that’s the case, then you have a big problem because I don’t think you can ever sync your phone to iTunes again without it removing all your music from your phone.

Hi, so I spoke with an Apple senior advisor, and she told me about deleting the music off the new iPhone and restoring, and I told her that I cannot do that because I have music that I’ve built over the years and not only from iTunes. She said because I’m unwilling to do that and because so many people are calling about the same issue, which she’s noticed has been happening since the iOS 17 update, she’ll escalate it to the engineers and hopefully it will get fixed by the next update! I said I’ve been reading that this has been happening for years and years and the best answer for so long has been to delete and restore. She said that this issue had gone away and just recently resurfaced so because so many people have this issue, they’ll try to figure out something by the next update. My sense is that she was really nice and was politely telling me that there’s no other solution. I don’t know. I’m crossing my fingers. Good luck to us all with this issue!

This is what worked for me! I did an Album artwork refresh through the Music app on my MacBook Pro. I then unchecked all of the playlists and re-synced everything so that it removed the playlists from my iPhone 15 Pro. I then shut down both the computer and the iPhone and restarted them. I went into the iTunes folder on my MacBook Pro and removed all previous libraries. I then pulled up my Music app on my MacBook Pro, re-checked my Playlists, and re-synced everything from the Music app (right click on iPhone and then click Sync) on the computer INSTEAD of the Finder Window, and it worked. I had been syncing everything from the Finder Window initially, but I won't be doing that again.

Mine reverted back to the wrong artwork, but I finally figured it out! Unfortunately, you have to do it through each individual song, but if you go into the song information and take out everything other than the song name and the artist, it FINALLY shows the correct artwork. This one was originally showing artwork for Cher lol.

Wow, this hack worked for me in two fairly annoying fronts:

1) Artwork was messed up in my iPhone 12 Pro, for months, before iOS 17 and beyond, and, even worse,

2) Once I followed the fully-delete-music-app-from-iphone trick, iPhone didn't wanted to sync with all my music in my Mac Music, but only the last bunch I've imported. So unchecking ALL songs in Mac Music, syncyng, checking all songs again, and syncing again, did the trick!

I didn't have to do the laborious going song by song hassle (so far, after 1 day of applying this solution).

Thank you Teresa!!

I've been having the same problem and some albums are just refusing to use the correct artwork. I have a large music collection so I'm syncing manually and some albums I can get to use the correct artwork by deleting them and recopying them over 3-4 times. But some just refuse to work and none of the tricks posted on the forums have worked for me yet. I'm on a MacBook Pro and using an iPhone so you'd think this basic function would work correctly.

Thank you, Maizo9, for sharing your issue. I’ve been searching for a solution for a couple of hours to no avail. I just synced my new iPhone 15 pro max with my iMac running Monterey, and I’m faced with the exact same problem you face. I did everything you did and stopped at erasing the phone and restoring from backup. I plan to call Apple Support first thing tomorrow morning, but I have a feeling I’m not going to get anywhere with them. I don’t use iCloud. Right now, my Cinderella album has Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album cover artwork! But the songs in each album seem correct and stayed in order, but the songs have different artwork than even the cover of the album. Let’s see what comes out of talking to Apple. Please keep me updated if you come across a solution. Thanks!

Same issue, new 15 pro running 17.2.1. I tunes updated on laptop. No problems on laptop, phone has all wrong artwork. Tried settings, click name at top, media and purchases, sign out, then sign in. No fix same result, wrong artwork?

Forgive my ignorance, but if I have added custom artwork to my music (artwork that I found online, downloaded, and manually added to albums that lacked correct artwork), will deleting the Album Artwork\Cache also delete the custom artwork that I manually added??? I did a lot of work to correct the album art on my computer. I hate to mess that up! I hope the actual artwork database is seprate fromt the cache you mention above. I so want this solution to work. Spending $1,300 USD on a new phone and having scambled album artwork it pretty disappointing. Incidently 99% of my music was ripped from CD, and is not from the music store, if that matters. Thanks so much, I hope you see this and can find time to respond.