iTunes Resetting Play Count Since Apple Music Subscription

Long post alert, sorry. 

I’m one of those old dinosaurs that Apple must hate – I’ve been using iTunes since the mid-2000s and I still use it on a daily basis a Windows 10 laptop as my main music repository. I still rip CDs into my library and download music from the iTunes Store, then sync it to my iPod Touch. 

In all of the years that I’ve been using it, I’ve never had any major problems with iTunes, but I’ve noticed over the last few months that when I start it up, it’s often reset play counts to zero or reduced them by several plays since the last time I used it. 

In October 2025, I signed up for a 3-month free trial of Apple Music, but before I had a chance to cancel it, I ended up in hospital for 6 weeks, totally forgot about the free trial and a monthly subscription to Apple Music kicked in automatically while I was still there. 

When I got home from the hospital and fired up my laptop, iTunes wouldn’t start up properly and reported some files missing. So, I removed it from my laptop and downloaded it again, sorry I don’t remember if it was from the Apple or Microsoft websites that I downloaded it from, if that makes any difference. 

The version of iTunes I downloaded started interfacing with Apple Music as soon as I started it up and wouldn’t let me create any playlists unless I uploaded my library to iCloud, which is something I’d never had to do in the previous 20 years of using iTunes (yes, I know Apple Music didn’t exist all those years ago).

This is when I started noticing some weird stuff starting to happen with iTunes – I’d find tracks that had a “last played” date displayed but a zero play count, then the odd track that I know I’d recently played would have its play count reduced. It’s been getting worse recently, and when I opened iTunes this morning, over 2000 tracks had had their play counts reset to zero.

I’m assuming that my Apple Music subscription is involved here somewhere, but could anyone confirm it please? If so, is there anything I can do to prevent it?

Would cancelling my Apple Music subscription stop this from happening?

I know iTunes is old technology these days, and I’m sure that Apple would like nothing more than for all of us old dinosaurs to stop using it and just roll over and submit to its streaming services, but I’m not a great fan of music streaming. I much prefer “real” music on a physical CD or vinyl, or downloaded from the Apple Store to “renting” music from Apple. 

By the way, I’m not a total Luddite – I use streaming for all of my TV services, I’ve got an iPhone and an iPad and I’m pretty much tech-savvy; it’s just music streaming I’m not a fan of. 

I hope that someone can offer some advice or help, and apologies again for the ridiculously long post.