How to Fix Erroneous Apple Music Geoblock Message

by Rian

Being a music streaming platform, Apple Music isn’t free from geoblock. Or better yet, Apple Music and others are generally not from licensing disagreement often found in music industry. I personally find it odd that interested parties behind a streaming agreement would rather pull the song down, rather than keeping the fees on the balance to be divided after the lawsuit. Call it, ‘for fans’, or whatever.

Preface

Having said all that, it is entirely possible the song in question has been pulled from the region. Before delving into how to fix it, I recommend doublechecking if the song is officially removed. One method to be sure is to manually search the song on Apple Music, and see if you can stream the music from search result. If it is pulled from the platform, there won’t be any results in the first place or will redirect you out of the result immediately.

In my case, the songs I’ve found from Shazam matches were all greyed-out. It was entirely possible K-Pop licensing issues triggered to have the songs removed, —yes, it’s the same nyan song from radio— but the listings seemed a tad bit random. When I searched for the song on Apple Music (still on the iOS Music app), the song played just fine from the search result; it was only greyed-out from my personal library.

Solutions

Do be mindful that changes made to Apple Music library can take up to few hours.

1. From Settings (iOS) > Music, turn off Sync Library.
2. Force quit Music app.
3. Turn on the Sync Library again, this will take awhile. Even the switch may take awhile to update to On position.

Afterthoughts

My bet is that this is a typical corrupted library error, where re-downloading the entire library solves the problem. Before the days of Apple Music, iTunes suffered from similar issues if I recall correctly. The fix at the time was revert back to automatically generated backups that are saved locally. With the new Apple Music, especially on mobile platform, neither the backup nor the library itself is appropriately labeled for accessibility. Currently, there is no way to revert back to old library file without relying on the cloud (i.e. turning on and off the sync library), and the library itself shows incorrect error message (i.e. region lock) as if the song has been removed from the platform.

This isn’t my first encounter where streaming apps with downloadable contents gave problems. I haven’t seen it for myself yet, but subreddit for PSN often talks about locked out from game titles when the title in question is definitely purchased through Playstation. It appears the problem is relatively inherent to the design itself, albeit it doesn’t excuse Apple Music’s nonsensical error message.