Why are some songs greyed out on iTunes?

For those of you who this did NOT fix the issue, after some poking, I found that numerous songs had an option at the verry bottom of the drop down menu (after right clicking) "check selection" or "uncheck selection". After clicking this option the song now shows up normally and allows it to be burned, added to playlists, etc. Hope it helps!!!!

Thank You!! After trying all other methods, this was the only one that worked for me.

Sorted at last! thanks fisholito01

This worked perfect. I right clicked on each song scrolled down to the bottom to check selection clicked on it and now the songs are not greyed out and the album plays from start to finish without having to click on the next song. Thanks so much for the info. I have only done this on 1 album but I have several with this problem..so now I can fix it.

Notice that most of the songs greyed out are the most famous ones. In my repository it happened on the La Traviata's Drinking song from National Philharmonic but not from the Berliner one, and some other pieces that are famous but not that wide-known or not presented by a top-class performer. Companies may charge more for the copyrights for some of pieces in an album and Apple may think it doesn't deserve to buy.

Found a solution to my problem. When you are looking at "My Music", look on top right of iTunes under search, there is a dropdown where you can choose songs, albums, artist etc. Click on Songs and you will notice that the greyed out songs are not checked. I'm not sure how this defaults, or gets set, but if you check the box, the songs will now appear and be playable. If somone finds out how to ignore this checkbox or can find out how to select all without having to click each song, it would be appreciated 🙂

You can check all selections by going to the My Music, then on upper right, select Songs instead of Albums, select one song, then press Cmd-A to select all music, right click/two-finger click, in the context menu select "Check Selection," and done.

some songs are on multriple albums. So when a song is greyed out, just search for the song and youll be able to download it as a single.

I wish I would have read this 2 hours ago! This is what solved the issue for me too. Thank you very much.

Thank you! This solved my problem that I never had before til today. Wham,did exactly what you instructed and frustrated problem went poof! Thanks!

Thank you!!! I don't know how I did that in the first place, or how I missed it either!

be prepared that doing this is going to lose all ur saved iCloud data for songs already transferred. tried this and lost everything.

This is really bizarre. The "check" step worked perfectly for me. The reason I was really confused is that all the songs in the playlist played perfectly fine yesterday (!!!), and today some of them became unchecked randomly. ***? I did not "uncheck" them for sure. Nobody is using this computer except me.

Apple is completely silent about this whole issue with iTunes and Music app on iPhone as if it does not exist. in fact, there are so many issues, I do not even known where to start. For instance, the "Shuffle" button issue is completely impossible to comprehend.

I agree. I definitely did NOT go in and 'un' check the box either. Weird

I don't know if someone else has posted this yet, but I was experiencing the same issue, and then when I figured out what the problem was, proceeded to connect my palm to my face very forcefully. At some undetermined point, a large section of my music had been "unchecked", that is to say that all of the music has a checkbox next to it, and apparently checking v. unchecking affects the playability of the music. So all I did was select all of my music by song, right click and click "check selection" and all of my music was suddenly playable. I hope this helps somebody.