How to Remedy Apple Music Library Issue after Region Change

by Rian

It has been about two weeks since I migrated my primary Apple account over to South Korea. The migration itself was near instantaneous. What caught me completely off guard was Apple Music’s behavior across the different Music apps. On iOS, the app displayed my library (with albums available in the region). On tvOS, I did need to reboot, but after some time, it was able to rebuild the library for me. It was the macOS Music app that gave trouble. First with “the Cloud Music Library can’t be loaded”, and when I tried to log in again, it simply refused.

I’ll explain my theory in the tangent. The settings to sign in and out of Apple Music live under Account in the menu bar. However, when you are signing into an account, instead of giving it the original email address, if your region allows it, provide your phone number instead. Music app takes it, even though it has been refusing to connect the same account by email address.

If your region does not support phone number or a secondary method of logging in, you may want to log in with a secondary or throwaway account instead; from the eyes of the app, it’s always the ‘new’ account.

It is my suspicion that the behavior of Music app comes partly from its age. iTunes, back in the day, did not offer a region change program. If you were in the US and paying in USD, your account never left the region. So it is expecting an entirely different account, not a subtly region-changed one. Music app, if my suspicion is correct, also cannot tell that the phone number leads to the same account.

Overall, the migration itself was painless but tedious. On the App Store front, where I suspected I would be hit the hardest, I won’t even know how much I’d pay in KRW for subscriptions until they all lapse and need to be renewed manually. On the Apple TV platform side, I lost access to a bigger catalog of TV shows and movies, but seeing as licensing was always a thorn in my side, I genuinely believe a subscription would be a more hassle-free way to watch most content.