When you launch Apple Music to choose one of your playlists, you expect to see a familiar list. But over the past few weeks, many Apple Music users have been seeing other people’s playlists among their own due to an increasingly widespread Apple Music bug.
As spotlighted by Redditor adh1003, who said it “appears to be a truly horrific bug in the Apple Music servers themselves,” the Apple Music app has been arbitrarily deleting playlists in some users’ accounts and adding other users’ playlists into other accounts. The bugs are seemingly related–once Apple Music accidentally sends the wrong playlists into someone’s library, it’s deleted, which in turn syncs back to the original creator’s account and deletes the playlist from there, too. Depending on how the playlist was created, the action could also remove the songs from the user’s library if they’ve opted to add them to their library.
It’s unclear whether Apple is aware of the bug, but there are numerous posts on Reddit as well as Apple’s community forums all describing the same issue. It’s seemingly an issue with iCloud sync, though it raises some concerns about a potential data leak. Playlists aren’t sensitive data, of course, but it could be part of a larger issue with the cloud service.
There isn’t much you can do to stop the bug other than turning off iCloud Music Library, which will remove all Apple Music songs from your music library. The iOS Apple Music app doesn’t allow you to download playlists for safekeeping, but you can export playlists with Apple Music on the Mac as an XML file which can then be re-imported into Apple Music if it gets deleted.
Apple is releasing iOS 16.4 next week as well as a new music app, Apple Music Classical, so it’s possible that any issues are cleared up with the update.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.