When you launch Apple Music to choose one of your playlists, you’d expect to see a familiar list. But over the past few weeks, many Apple Music users have seen other people’s playlists among their own due to a growing Apple Music bug.
As pointed out by Redditor adh1003, who said it “seems to be a really awful bug in the Apple Music servers themselves”, the Apple Music app has arbitrarily deleted playlists in some users’ accounts and added playlists from other users in other accounts. The bugs are apparently related – once Apple Music accidentally sends the wrong playlists to someone’s library, it gets deleted, which in turn syncs to the original creator’s account and also deletes the playlist from there. Depending on how the playlist was created, the action may also remove songs from the user’s library if they chose to add them to their library.
It’s unclear if Apple is aware of the bug, but there are numerous posts on Reddit as well as Apple community forums all describing the same issue. This is apparently an issue with iCloud syncing, although it does raise concerns about possible data leakage. Playlists aren’t sensitive data, of course, but that could be part of a larger issue with the cloud service.
There’s not much you can do to stop the bug other than turning off iCloud Music Library, which will delete all Apple Music songs from your music library. The iOS Apple Music app does not allow you to download playlists for storage, but you can export playlists with Apple Music on Mac as an XML file which can then be imported back into Apple Music if it is removed.
Apple is releasing iOS 16.4 next week along with a new music app, Apple Music Classical, so it’s possible that all issues will be fixed with the update.
