Why are some songs greyed out on iTunes?

The "Uncheck Selection" answer does not work for Apple Music songs, only music you've uploaded yourself or bought from the iTunes store.

For Apple Music selections, if the song is grayed out, and you see a faint dotted cloud icon beside the song when viewing it in Apple Music, then it's not currently available for download and probably not available to play via Apple Music (possibly because of a licencing prohibition).

Certainly, that's been my experience.

(For example, on the Erin Brockovich sound track, I can't play track 12, "Redemption Day" or track 23 "Every day is a winding road, by Sheryl Crow)

(Strangely enough, if you go to the Sheryl Crow debut album on Apple Music, you can download those tracks, perhaps because the royalties payments are different when accessed via that album.)

I still use CDs for any music that really matters to me, because what you can listen to on Apple Music depends on a lot of decisions not under your control.

I use Apple Music as a kind of add-on and gap filler for music I could live without if I had to.

Hope this helps

Cheers

I had this problem, but I didn't realize it was because the "allow explicit content" was disabled (by default) so just double click on the greyed out song and it will ask you if you want to enable it, then it wasn't greyed out anymore

Try this… I was at my wits end last evening trying to fix this
problem of a grayed out playlist that I synced to my ipod touch 6 that I just
purchased last week. I felt like Marty McFly in "Back to the Future"
when he slammed the steering wheel and the Delorean started up! I sat there and
tried everything that was suggested… nothing worked. So I just looked at the
screen and stared.. then I thought… ok, I'm going to do a CTRL Shift and click
on UNCHECK songs…. Ok, did this… then went back, did another CTRL Shift and
RECHECKED all the songs…. holy moly! It worked! All of a sudden the playlist
was no longer grayed out and synced to my Ipod just dandy! I'm a freakin'
genius LOL !!!!!!

Hi Andrew, I too experienced this similar problem, I decided to delete all my old playlist and create new ones, which initially I did successfully, all new playlists and contents synced to my iPhone 4s (used as iPod only) a few days later i added (via itunes) another 12 songs to one playlist in particular hit sync and thought no more of it,(carried on doing other things) sync complete I discounted iPhone only to find that when connected to my car the only music i had on my phone was those last 12 songs! all my other playlists were gone. On going back to iTunes I found that although the original songs were still showing under there respective playlists, the songs themselves were greyed out with the exception of the odd one or two, although if I clicked on them they would all play but they would not copy over to iPhone. After several hours of bashing my head of the desk I found the following to work with no problems. For some unexplained reason the songs had unchecked themselves??

So step 1, Go to each individual playlist were your songs are greyed out highlight first song on list then hit control A, this will highlight all songs in the list, then right click on mouse and scroll down to, and select 'Tick selection' left click mouse to clear the highlight, and you will find all songs are no longer greyed out and will play individually now.

Connect device (iPhone or iPod) Now simply drag each individual Playlist from iTunes up to the music folder under your respective device the playlist should now copy to and play from your device with no issues.

Andrew, this is my first ever response on a forum and I hope it helps mate, it certainly worked ok for me, incidentally my iTunes version is 12.5.5.5 with iPhone 4s iOS 9.3.5

Hope it helps bud! cheers

This doesn't seem to work for me. I'm trying to get "Money" and "Any Colour You Like" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to finally show up in my Apple Music streaming (it's been since March of 2015 since I could play them!). When I right click on the track, > Get Info > File, under iCloud Status it says "Waiting" What exactly is it waiting for? Do I need to do something to get it to finish?

4. Shurely you must pay Apple for his efforts… They bought music before the digital age and your music belongs to them. We must pay for his best effort named iTunes even if that **** will never work!.

Bingo! Thank you!

In iTunes, click the song's time (which turns into "...") for the drop-down menu. Then select "Check Selection" in the middle of the menu. You can also change all of the songs at once by first selecting all (CMD+A) then repeated the same step.

This option should be visible in the main playlist view. It's too easily overlooked and very frustrating.

It is actually much simpler than some of the explanations offered in this thread.

The grayed out songs are those songs that are "Unchecked" in the "Songs" view and in your iPhone/iPad setup in iTunes, you selected to "Sync only the checked songs". Thus, the grayed out songs are those that are NOT synced to your iDevice. However, and this is where it gets freaky, you can still view and play those songs on your iDevice, if you have synced your song library to iCloud with Music Match or Apple Music services. In some cases, I have even downloaded manually the songs to my iPhone from iCloud. The main difference is that iTunes will NOT sync those songs automatically for you.

I was surprised to see that some of my songs were unchecked. A real "duh" moment for me.

Pretty sure that this means that the song is added to "My Music", but not downloaded (available offline)

That worked. Thanks for your help!!

That worked perfectly for me - thanks ohneSchatten! 🙂

Thank you man!

No...its because the track is "Album Only". So Apple Music shows the track as grayed out. I just launched the same album in iTunes Store and then realized this is what's happening!

For me, the issue occurs when I activate iTunes Match on the computer. I can't figure out how to solve the issue.