IOS 9.3 Apple Music Playlists are missing songs

As a DJ who has spent over 8 years building up playlists for all my gigs and genres this was a very frustrating problem to experience.

I found the best way to get round this was to invest more time into smart playlists and use tag words in the group section of the metadata to populate these playlists.

I've been doing this for about 3 months now and as my manual playlists keep randomly either emptying or have multiple tracks removed the smart playlists remain in tact, so far so good.

I've attached 2 images below which I hope will help those experiencing the same issue. As you can see the GROUPING column has various tags for my D&B sets and the smart lists on the right are set to look for:
- GENRE is Drum & Bass

- GROUPING contains [TAG WORD]

I feel your pain! as a Dj I have 100's of playlists and this was seriously messing my lists up!

I found a workout and actually created a tutorial on how to get around this. It won't fix iTunes removing files from manual playlists (I'm not sure you actually can) but gives you some tips on how to create better protected playlists!

http://ontheriseacademy.com/djs-itunes-deleting-songs-playlists/

Good luck!

I have a similar problem. I sync my iPhone with iTunes and a lot of songs are missing form one of my playlists. All of the songs are on my iPhone, they just aren't in the Playlist.

I'm using a smart playlist to select all of my songs rated with 4 or more stars. Only about 12% of the songs appear in the playlist on my phone, although all of the songs are on my phone.

I'm not sure how this can be labeled "solved" with this answer. I know there are thousands of devoted Apple souls who feel as betrayed as I do with the many horribly glitchy iTunes updates and UX that have destroyed years of careful music curation. My playlists are gutted. This is not the way to treat high value customers.

Same here. It's the first time I've lost playlists. I can't seem to find any resolution online for this. I'll keep reading these forums.

I've lost all but 3 songs. None of the suggestions have worked.

Worked great! Thank you for helping.

Totally agree this is not solves at all.