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Apple Music/iTunes Replacing My Album Artwork

Hi. This might have been the case for a while, or maybe I'm just noticing it now that I'm trying Apple Music. In any event, I've noticed that my album artwork on my iPhone has been changing to images that I have never picked. I'm pretty meticulous about my album artwork, and I know what's correct for my albums. Is there a way to prevent this from happening and for my own album artwork to remain the way it is? Thanks.

iPhone 6, iOS 8, 8.0.2

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 11:26 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 2:19 PM

If you go into the Music tab in the Settings app, you can disable the iCloud Music Library. That will prevent Apple Music from interacting with what's saved on your phone and changing any of the artwork. Albums that have already been changed may need to be resynced. This doesn't prevent you from streaming from Apple Music, though it does prevent you from saving streamed playlists for offline use. Hopefully there's a better workaround than this, because right now it seems the only option is to do this and isolate your on phone library from the streaming one, or allow them to intermix and end up with wrong album art and multiples of the same song, sometimes not even the correct version.

56 replies

Jul 1, 2015 9:31 PM in response to JMG114

Found a solution, guys! After fighting with Apple Music matching the wrong song and album art so that I wasn't even streaming the correct file, it's apparently as simple as just changing the song title to something not by the artist. After it force uploads, you can go back and correct the song title and you'll be good to go.

Jul 2, 2015 4:37 PM in response to captphealy

Credit where credit is due - having turned of iCloud Music Library yesterday, I finally got around to syncing with iTunes today, and, at the end of the sync, it synced all of my artwork back to about 55% of the tunes on the phone - which is pretty close to a thumbnail guess of the percentage of songs with incorrect artwork (mainly compilations and other albums where I'd had to manually track down the cover art when iTunes' "get album artwork" function came up empty).


So, I've calmed down somewhat, although I do wish Apple would take the wide range of users' experience/preference/maintenance into account when unleashing stuff like Apple Music and incorporating it into existing software.

Aug 12, 2015 8:12 AM in response to Missfab76

Just another instance of "We know better!" corporate arrogance. How can Apple NOT know that we've been customizing our iTunes libraries all these years? And what makes them think we have unlimited free time to fix all of the problems they create in the proces? I don't mind having new features, but please let us decide when and how to incorporate them into our existing workflow!

Aug 30, 2015 6:11 AM in response to Spotnik

My solution when Apple Music replaces your album artwork by something else:


1. Sync your music in iTunes with Apple iCloud Library with correct artwork visible in iTunes. In My music of Apple Music (e.g. iPhone), you will see wrong artwork which is the assumption here.

2. Delete artwork in iTunes for that particular album (multiple items) which was synced to Apple Music with wrong artwork. You should see no artwork for the album in iTunes now.

3. Now update again the whole Apple iCloud Library (should last seconds) through iTunes. Wrong artwork remains in My Music of Apple Music.

4. Now add again correct artwork in iTunes for particular album (multiple items)

5. Now sync again the whole Apple iCloud Library (should last seconds) through iTunes. After syncing, you should see shortly correct artwork in My Music of Apple Music which you wanted to have..


Worked twice for me.

Oct 5, 2015 7:39 PM in response to JMG114

Same here - so many album covers replaced. Led Zeppelin is now Dread Zeppelin, random songs won't upload, I can't erase my phone music library and start again, the music refuses to disappear from music app (I've synced with my laptop iTunes which is empty, and should wipe everything but no, the physical songs remain, icloud library & apple music set to OFF) - utter shambles. Not going to keep using Apple Music unless they sort all of this crap out.

Oct 7, 2015 10:18 PM in response to JMG114

Just subscribed to Apple Music having pondered doing it for some time now... at first I thought it was pretty cool that my entire iTunes Library from my Mac now appeared to be on my iPad.


But its like I've lent my albums to my dis-organised brother and he's returned them in the wrong sleeves AND put greasy finger-marks all over the vinyl!


Be Bop Deluxe: 'Axe Victim' has 'Air Age Anthology' sleeve; 'Modern Music' has 'Futurist Manifesto' sleeve; 'Tramcar to Tomorrow' has 'Axe Victim' sleeve! Worse than these, the original, debut 'Bad Company' album has the '10 from 6' sleeve artwork!! The trend here is that the replacements are from hits collections?


You will note I'm only on the B's... I haven't ventured further. So-far my library on the Mac is fine and all in order.


This is the wrong thread to list everything that's wrong but just wanted add my voice to the concern shown here. At the moment I'm already (after three days) thinking of un-subscribing. Love iTunes (or what it used to be) but not sure I need Apple Music.


The solution from gobbsk above sounds good but life's too short to be having to do that!

Oct 10, 2015 9:45 AM in response to JMG114

I jumped on Apple Music as soon as it launched and had similar problems from the beginning. Since I wanted to be able to download music to my devices (just the way I can with Spotify) I had to enable iCloud Library. That messed up my iTunes library on the Mac and screwed things up on my iOS devices, too. I called Apple and at that point, the best they could do was to help me restore my system to a few days before I had enabled iCloud Library.


That took care of the worst problems, but I *still* have issues cropping up with my iTunes library (missing cover art, wrong cover art, iTunes freezing up for no apparent reason when it never did before, etc.). I just fix it when I encounter it but I did not extend the Apple Music trial period. Spotify works better for me because it leaves my iTunes library alone. If I had the option of using Apple Music as a standalone app, I'd do it because it does seem to have a better selection of music than Spotify.

Oct 15, 2015 11:26 AM in response to Kabuscus

NOT SO! After trying (and canceling) Apple Music, most of the 5,000+ songs in my iTunes library have had incorrect artwork replaced on my iMac and my Windows laptop. The only device that's not messed up is my iPod Touch, which is fine because it was plugged into my car the entire time I had the Apple Music trial. Now I'm afraid to sync my iPod to my computers because they have the wrong artwork.

Oct 15, 2015 11:35 AM in response to Kabuscus

NOT SO! After the free trial (and subsequent cancellation) of Apple music, most of the 5,000+ songs in my iTunes library had the artwork replaced with incorrect art - on my iMac and Windows laptop. The only device unaffected is my iPod Touch - only because it was plugged into my car the entire time of the Apple Music trial. Now I'm afraid to sync it in case it "updates" the bogus artwork. Nice job, Apple! Forcing us to do things "the Apple way" is why some of us use you products begrudgingly.

Oct 15, 2015 11:37 AM in response to Kabuscus

NOT SO! After the free trial (and subsequent cancellation) of Apple music, most of the 5,000+ songs in my iTunes library had the artwork replaced with incorrect art - on my iMac and Windows laptop. The only device unaffected is my iPod Touch - only because it was plugged into my car the entire time of the Apple Music trial. Now I'm afraid to sync it in case it "updates" the bogus artwork. Nice job, Apple! Forcing us to do things "the Apple way" is why some of us use you products begrudgingly.

Oct 15, 2015 11:40 AM in response to Kabuscus

NOT SO! After the free trial (and subsequent cancellation) of Apple music, most of the 5,000+ songs in my iTunes library had the artwork replaced with incorrect art - on my iMac and Windows laptop. The only device unaffected is my iPod Touch - only because it was plugged into my car the entire time of the Apple Music trial. Now I'm afraid to sync it in case it "updates" the bogus artwork. Nice job, Apple! Forcing us to do things "the Apple way" is why some of us use you products begrudgingly.

Oct 19, 2015 8:26 PM in response to flixnpix

Hello guys. First post.


I have also been having problems with Apple music and my covers. The recent udpate of Itunes was getting"stuck" while updating the iCloud library. Here's what I did:

1.Completely uninstall itunes ( I used REVO uninstaller for Win7) and restart

2. Installed the Previous version of Itunes (The one from july)

3. I was able to edit my covers without updating the library. Whenever it would stop changing i would restart windows and voila!


Hope it works out for you. Cheers!

Feb 22, 2016 3:12 PM in response to Jan@Mac

It's ridiculous that this happens - couldn't believe it when I subscribed to Apple Music last night and found what a mess it had made of my artwork. It's issues like this that you simply can't justify for an organisation the size of Apple.


However, I found an easy fix, albeit a time-consuming one depending on the size of your existing music library. Simply right click on every affected album in iTunes (which still shows the correct artwork), hit 'Get Info' to edit, select the 'Artwork' tab, then cut the image (Command + X) and paste it back (Command + V), then 'Ok' to finish editing. Within a matter of seconds (depending on your network speed), the artwork will be corrected on your device(s).

Apple Music/iTunes Replacing My Album Artwork

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