Why is Siri unable to play music from my Apple Music library?

I updated my iPhone 12 Mini to 17.6.1 this morning and, as of right now, this seems to be working again.

If I press and hold the Siri button on my phone and say "Shuffle (Playlist Name)" it works. (To be clear, my playlists are stored in the Music app on my phone, mostly in MP3 format. I'm not streaming.)

I haven't yet tried this with CarPlay and pressing the Siri button on my steering wheel.

Just updating my post: So as of 17.6.1, I can ask Siri to play a playlist stored on my phone by saying "Shuffle (Playlist Name)" BUT this doesn't work when I'm connected to CarPlay.

When I'm connected to CarPlay, Siri just says "Looks like Apple Music can't play that." If I'm not connected CarPlay, Siri can play my playlist just fine. Super weird.

Hey! I might be a bit late to this but promoting Siri like "Hey Siri, shuffle my <insert playlist name here> on Apple music" seems to work for me.

If you don't want Siri to shuffle your playlist, just prompt it using "Hey siri, play my <insert playlist name here> on Apple Music".

The trick here is to give your playlist a unique name so that Siri will instantly match your prompt with your playlist and start playing your playlist.

It gets a whole lot tricky if your playlist has common names like "Favourite songs" for example. At that point, Siri will traverse through Apple Music's catalogue and might play someone else's playlist.

Hope this helps! :)

This is a work around for those with Apple Watch or iTunes Match Subscription.

From my observation Siri on CarPlay will only search the Apple Music Subscription for the playlist.

1. Apple Watch: For those with Apple Watch, this method bypass the Siri interface via CarPlay, simply raise the watch to your lips and say: “Hey Siri, play playlist x” and Siri will play flawlessly. Just have to make sure the “‘’Listen for “Siri” or “Hey Siri”’’ is activated on your watch. Search the web, if you don’t know how to do this;

2. iTunes Match Subscription: This is a more complicated work around and make sure you do this on WiFi; or else, the iPhone will gobble up your mobile data.:

• On your Mac or PC, on your iTunes app, Goto the “Settings” select “Sync Library”, then, “OK”. Following that - Click “File” - “Library” - “update Cloud Library”. This takes a while to complete.;
• Delete your music library from your iPhone :- Goto “Settings” - “General” - “iPhone Storage” - “Music”; then, scroll down to the middle of the page for ”Edit“, next to “All Songs” click on the red circle with “-“. Wait for a few minutes for the iPhone to delete all songs from the device.
• Goto “Settings” - “Music” - “Sync Library” toggle that option on.
• Open the Music app, from here you’ll find all your music library and playlist. At this point, the music library is stored online. Select the playlist that you use most often, you will find “+” on top of the screen, next to the name of your playlist. Click on the “+” sign to download the songs onto your device.

So, bear in mind, other then the playlist you have downloaded, the rest of the songs reside online, should you play all music while using CarPlay, you are using Mobile Data. Download as many playlist as you want and only ask Siri to play playlist.

From now on, until Apple Developers fix the Siri on CarPlay playlist search parameter, do not connect your device to your Mac or PC. Any music from iTunes to the devices will render playlist unworkable again.

Good Luck!!

Please share your response or solution from Apple if you get one. I would like to solve this. Thanks.

It’s working as of today….

Apple update 17.6 available now solved the problem.

I can too finally say that it seems fixed now that I have downloaded IOS 17.6!

Why is this fix taking so long?

It works properly when I'm on wifi but if I'm on a cell connection it won't play my playlists. Toggling show Apple Music on and back off and enabling Music to use cellular data didn't help.

Apple does not admit that this is a problem because it is intentional.

iOS 17.5 update did the same for me, the first time I've encountered this problem on iPhone SE 2nd gen since purchase in 2020.

I note that it is only the "playlist" command that generates the error, not "play" artist or music.

Tried:

Hard boot.

Created new playlist on macOS and synced over.

Disabled Siri, hard boot, re-abled.

Deleted all music and app (General > iPhone Storage), added app again, tracks appeared though greyed out before syncing. Unable to sync from macOS, claims complete but not done. Hard boot. Same problem unable to sync. Greyed out tracks (all) when selected in app get song not in your library or not available in country. Removed all playlists from iPhone using macOS Finder. Then enabled and synced again this time sync completed. Problem remains only for playlist command.

Searching so far appears to reveal this problem is not widespread and no raft of solutions to try.

Emailed Apple.

Last contact with apple said it is with engineering and tell customer to keep latest updates current. I think it is part of moving shared music to a pay for iCloud function, but have no confirmation of this. Ironic that the iPhone is an evolution of the iPod, and all us old school users are being forsaken for those that want to subscribe to low fidelity streams. So maybe I’ll switch to Apple Music and just buy a phone with less storage?

Same problem here. Also, it seems the latest version of macOS (14.5) has the problem too, though slightly different. On macOS 14.5, none of the smart playlists work with Siri, but some random subset of the regular playlists work, while the rest do not.

On my old 2014 iMac, which runs macOS 11.7.10, all playlists still work perfectly with Siri!