Apple Music won't play songs - "Not playing"

So starting last week at some point, Apple Music on my iPhone seems to have just stopped working. It refuses to play anything that is not in my library, nothing from "For you", "Radio", or any saved Apple Music Playlists.

The now playing card only shows "Not playing". If I hit the play button enough times it seems to just pick a random set of songs from my library and start playing.

I have already tried:

Restarting the music app
Reinstalling the music app
Resetting network settings
Restarting the iPhone
Signing out of iCloud and singing back in.
Erasing all content and settings (I restored from backup, I might need to try this again without restoring)

No luck from any of the above. Anyone know how to fix this?

iPhone 7 Plus, iOS 11.3

Posted on Apr 10, 2018 11:02 AM

Top-ranking reply

Scott Willsey

Level 1

47 points

Posted on Apr 29, 2018 5:23 PM

I think I know what's going on and why only a clean install without backup restore fixed the issue. It appears to be a corrupt cache file.

I have the same issue and I can play anything I purchased, whether downloaded or in the cloud, but I cannot play anything from Apple Music. I can download songs, but then I get a dialog box about the song not being authorized rather than the silent fail and "Not Playing" status I get if I try to stream it from Apple Music.

Anyway, I connected the iPhone to my Mac and fired up Console, and here's what I see when I try to play an Apple Music song in the Music app:

default

15:26:53.305659 -0700

SpringBoard

Request: playbackState 66A52D72-244F-4A19-9511-B866A7744A5F for origin-iPhone/client-com.apple.Music-766 (Music)/player-Music is short-circuiting because cache

default

15:26:53.308170 -0700

SpringBoard

Response: playbackState 66A52D72-244F-4A19-9511-B866A7744A5F returned Stopped with error (null) for origin-iPhone/client-com.apple.Music-766 (Music)/player-Music in 0.0006 seconds

I have a case open with Apple and am going to talk to them on the phone tomorrow, but my guess is they can't do anything other than take my console log and see if they can learn something from it while I wipe my phone and try to get on with my life.

I do have iMazing and iExplorer, and I should hopefully be able to restore app data for those apps that don't use the cloud to store it. Either way, it's going to be a painful experience and a massive waste of time.

View in context

79 replies

Jan 19, 2019 9:22 AM in response to cmx

I have the same issue on my iPhone 8+. It started off like that and after installing the 12.1.2 update, it's still the same situation. Please, this seems as a serious issue, especially if you consider that the paying customers are not receiving their service. I should note that I only started a trial, but still...

Someone from Apple should reply.

Thanks

Bubzy57

Level 1

4 points

Jan 23, 2019 9:26 PM in response to cmx

So I got the same “ Not Playing” when I tried to play any streamed song. All I did to fix this was I went to the settings. In the settings you go to iTunes and App Store. You log out of your apple account. Then you go into Apple Music and sign in with your Apple ID which should be subscribed. You should be able to listen to any song and sign back in your account in the settings.

Apr 3, 2019 1:25 PM in response to cmx

What worked for me was to un-download all my music and then re-download it. Kind of a pain, but it worked.

Apr 5, 2019 10:13 AM in response to cmx

What worked for me is going into settings and signing out of my Apple ID under iTunes and AppStore and then resigning in again

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Apple Music won't play songs - "Not playing"