Apple Music is Broken
In November 2011, Steve Jobs introduced iTunes Match, a revolutionary service that would allow you to match your local files in iTunes with the copies in Apple’s iTunes Store directory, making them available to you on all your Apple devices, completely DRM free. If an album wasn’t in their library — say a rare live recording, or a remix album — iTunes would instead upload the file to the cloud where it would be ready and waiting for you to download to another device when needed. All this for $25/year. It was an incredible service and one that music lovers like me immediately jumped upon.
Flash forward four years and Apple launched Apple Music, a brand new music streaming service that gave users access to Apple’s vast music library for a low monthly fee. It was much less revolutionary (after all companies like Spotify had been around for years) but this had that Apple touch, and best of all, it integrated directly within iTunes meaning your local files and cloud files all lived in harmony. It also featured a similar matching service where your files were matched or uploaded to iCloud Music Library and would be available for you across your devices.
But it was also fundamentally broken.
As a big music lover, and someone with a massive iTunes Library I jumped on board Apple Music almost instantly, even though I was already paying for a Spotify subscription (and had previously tried all the other services available here in Canada including my beloved Rdio). I had been using iTunes Match since its launch four years prior and was very happy with it, so I saw no reason not to take the leap to the new service. But very quickly I discovered it was kind of broken.
First, a bit on the user interface design for Apple Music. Apple has always given you two ways to “search” for music (on iOS anyways; it’s actually three on the MacOS app): Apple Music and Your Library.It’s always been kind of clunky, but the reasoning behind it does make sense. Searching “Apple Music” returns results from the Apple catalogue and is limited to whatever they currently have streaming rights to, where as “Your Library” returns results from your personal collection and includes anything you might have ripped/purchased/downloaded yourself. So say you grabbed a live recording of John Mayer from Archive.org you’d want to search “Your Library” in order to find it, because searching “Apple Music” would return no results (or in this case, just some playlists).
That’s how it’s supposed to work anyways. The issue I quickly discovered was that sometimes, and it’s seemingly entirely arbitrary, when searching for an album or song in Apple Music’s library, what it will actually playback is a song from a completely different album with the same title and artist.
Example of Apple Music returning an incorrect track from 2015
Here’s a video I made way back in 2015 showing this exact behaviour. I went to play the track “I’m All Over It” by Jamie Cullum from his album The Pursuit and instead was served a live recording I had in my personal library.
And this bug persists to this day.
Example of Apple Music returning incorrect tracks in 2021
Here’s just a handful of examples that persist to this day (this is by no means comprehensive, just a number that I remembered encountering this past week). In this video we see me try to play four tracks from the Apple Music library.
Firstly I load up John Mayer’s album Born and Raised. The first track plays back an acoustic version from the album The Complete 2012 Performances Collection — EP (this EP is available on Apple Music but this track in particular doesn’t seem to be — I may have ripped it from a YouTube video). The next track pulls up a live version from a different album, Born and Raised Tour Live in Hartford (which is available on Archive.org). Then we hop over to the Coldplay album Mylo Xyloto where the track “Charlie Brown” pulls up a version from their Live in Madrid — EP.Finally we revisit our friend Jamie Cullum and attempt to play the track “These are the Days” from his album Twentysomething. Instead we are treated to a live rendition from the album Live in Leipzig which was ripped from a radio broadcast. In each case, because these tracks aren’t available in the Apple Music library they are classified as “uploaded” in iTunes (as opossed to “Matched”). It’s also important to note that sometimes Apple serves the correct track (the first 3 tracks of Mylo Xyloto were in fact correct) and it’s completely arbitrary when it decides to get it oh so very wrong (in the case of Born and Raised we’re being served incorrect tracks from two completely different albums).
In the past, this was a minor nuisance. Most of the time I search “Your Library” anyways and I get the correct version of the track, but there would be some cases where these alternate versions would be served to me. The most common was when I would ask Siri to play an album for me — for whatever reason Siri will always serve up the verison from Apple Music, and if that version has this mismatch issue, I’ll hear the wrong song. This is usually rectified by asking Siri again and specifically saying “Play [Title of Album] from My Library please” (though this doesn’t always work). The other instance I would run into this would be Apple’s curated music playlists. If those playlists contained a track that featured this mismatch issue, I would be served the broken match, not the original track Apple intended to include in the playlist. Again, annoying but not a deal breaker. I had been suffering through this since the launch of Apple Music in 2015, but managed to deal with it (even if I found it immensely frustrating at times).
But then things changed in 2021.
Last week Apple launched Spatial Audio and Lossless playback for the Apple Music library. This brought not only lossless versions of tracks to Apple Music subscribers, but also brand new Dolby Atmos mixes. As a music lover I couldn’t wait to experience them both (and I wrote about my experiences here).
But I quickly started to encounter a problem. If I tried to playback the lossless version or Dolby Atmos version of an album or track that had this mismatch problem I would be served the incorrectly matched track instead of the Lossless/Atmos version. And considering just how prevalent this problem was in my library it meant that it was happening a lot. I was limited as to just how much I could enjoy this “biggest advancement ever in sound quality” that Apple was so excited to promote.
I took to Twitter and wrote a thread detailing my issues. Turns out, I was not alone. Christina Warren also was also experiencing the issue, as were a few other Twitter users.
This is a big problem. While it’s true that Apple are including these new formats at no extra cost, it’s still part of the value add for Apple Music subscribers and for them not to work as advertised is something they should be aware of and on top of.
So what is the solution? Well, there is a work around, but you aren’t going to like it…
Essentially the way to force Apple Music to serve back the proper version and not the mismatched track is to delete the mismatched track from your library. That’s right: delete music from your collection. There’s just two problems with that: the first is you have to figure out exactly what that mismatch is, and the second (and arguably the far worse problem) is that it means removing something from your library that you probably want to keep. After all, there was a reason you added it in the first place.
For me, that’s a non-starter. I’m not about to start deleting parts of my collection to solve a problem that should be up to Apple to fix. But if you are willing to sacrifice part of your collection, I can at least try to help with that first probelm.
Open iTunes (this might also work with Music.app on newer Macs, but I avoid it like the plague), navigate to “Browse” (so you’re searching the Apple Music library), search for the album in question, find the song that is playing back incorrectly, right click and select “Song Info” and it should pop-up the version of the song it’s playing back from your library. Your mileage may vary.
This also reveals just how bizarre the matching process Apple is using really is. In this case the only two pieces of metadata that are the same are the song’s title, and the artist. Everything else about it is different; the album it comes from, the track number, the year of release, and even the runtime (the studio version is 4:45 while the live version it’s serving is 5:02). In what universe is this an accurate match? Why isn’t Apple using acoustic fingerprinting, or matching all the elements of the metadata? How could they get it so wrong?
(This is especially problematic with Greatest Hits collections. Those albums regularly use alternate edits of tracks in an effort to cram more songs onto a disc. But now, when listening to the original albums on Apple Music you might be served an edited version from a greatest hits compilation just because the title and artist matched.)
Knowing this, I did try testing deleting an offending album and then adjusting the metadata so the match would be different (in this case appending [Live] to the titles of all the tracks) but this seemed pretty hit or miss as to whether it worked. And even still, it’s a huge amount of work to go through, figure out what album is causing the mismatch, copy it to a new location, delete it from iTunes, take the copy and adjust the metadata, add back to iTunes, wait for iCloud Music Library to update and hope for the best. Not to mention in so doing you lose all your play count data and the track will be removed from any playlists you might have had it in. Again, it’s a solution, just not a very good one.
It’s clear that Apple Music has a serious Metadata problem, as Kirk McElhearn outlined in a blog post from 2015 (for what it’s worth, problems like this are still happening).
Of course the tragic irony of all of this is most users probably will never encounter this issue. Rather, it’s people like me who are obsessive about music; who have been collecting for years, who have live versions and demo versions and acoustic versions and remixed versions. The people who care the most about their music and their libraries are the ones most likely to encounter this issue, and that is just such a bummer. I have a nice home theatre setup that can playback the Dolby Atmos tracks in surround sound. I have a very nice setup in my office that can take full advantage of lossless audio. And yet I can’t actually take full advantage of these features because of this matching issue.
So please, Apple, fix this. If it can’t be done automatically or with AI then allow us to report incorrect matches, or even allow the option for us to re-match manually. Anything is better than simply deleting parts of our collection. Apple Music positions itself as the best streaming service out there, but issues like this prove it is anything but.