Apple Music Definitive Solution? "This song is not currently available in your country or region."

[bobob]

Has anyone found the definitive solution to the "This song is not currently available in your country or region." problem?

A clear step-by-step works-every-time solution would be much appreciated.

Every 6 months or so, most of my songs on iTunes/Apple Music all of a sudden disappear with the above error message coming up when I attempt to play them. These are songs directly imported from my own old collection of original CD's.

Every time the problem comes up, I go searching on the net for a fix, but there does not seem to be a simple definitive solution that works every time. Most solutions are variations on "fully close the app by swiping up / completely shutdown the iPhone / restart and give the iPhone time to reload songs". This sometimes just works on the specific songs that I had attempted to play and received the error message on. Other songs around it remain inaccessible.

Although I'm a longtime Apple fanboy, iTunes/Apple Music has become a major irritant. I count myself lucky that at least my music stored on my Apple Watch seems to be fully partioned off from this problem, and is always available.

I understand that there are many benefits to a full Apple Music subscription and/or iTunes Match, but I wish there were a simple offline offshoot to iTunes for the separate storage of my own personal music collection, so that I could always count on being able to here my songs whenever I wish.



Edit: Mods moved my thread down to one of these never-visited off-the-beaten-track forums, so I'm guessing no one who might know the answer will ever see it.

 

[prometheus44]

I just ran into the same issue. Recovered 20k songs from my old iPod, subscribed to iTunes Match in order to get my tracks on my phone, and this morning discovered that some tracks had this warning. I am positive some of them were ripped from my own CDs, and most of my motivation to subscribe to iTunes Match was to not have some CDs partly unavailable because of régional restrictions...
The most viable alternative would be Plex, which is ok but doesn't have an Apple Watch app and isn't as ful fledged as iTunes when it comes to music library management

 

[CruiserChris]

@bobob and @prometheus44: I had the same problem. If you are haven't found a solution, here's what I did to fix it. But first, to confirm we are talking about the same issue, here are some observations about my situation:

• The issue only occurs with music greyed out on iOS/iPadOS devices.
• It only happens with songs that show as Matched in the Cloud Status column when using the song browser view on a Mac.
• The greyed out songs are identified in the song browser view on a Mac with the dotted cloud symbol in the Cloud Download column.
• Attempting to play the greyed out song on the device results in the message “This song is not currently available in your country or region”.
• My Music Library contains more than 11,500 tracks (“songs” in Apple’s terminology) and consists entirely of music media I own (i.e., ripped from CD’s or digitized from tapes and LP’s). More than 7000 of these show as Matched. The rest show as Uploaded.

I have found that most problems with the Cloud Library can be fixed by deleting and re-importing the affected songs. In this case, I’m not sure it’s a permanent solution, but the process detailed below worked for me. Be warned, however, this was a fairly slow and tedious fix mostly because of the size of my Music Library and the number of songs that were affected (over 900 of my Matched songs).

Also be warned that this process will cause affected songs to be deleted from previously created playlists. In my case, I have relatively few playlists so found it easy to take note of any songs that needed to be restored to my playlists. To facilitate identifying affected songs in playlists, it’s best to switch the playlist to the song browser view.

Step 1: In Music>Preferences, in the Files section, ensure the following items are checked:

- Keep Music Media folder organized​

- Copy Files to Music Media folder when adding to library​

Step 2: Ensure an up-to-date backup of the music media files is available.

Step 3: In the left pane, under Library, select Songs and ensure the Cloud Download and Cloud Status columns are displayed. Control+Click in a blank part of the column header to view the list of active/available columns. It can also be useful to have the Disc Number, Track Number columns displayed along with the Album, Album Artist and Artist columns. Do the same for any playlists to be monitored for songs that will need to be restored under Step 13.

Step 4: In the song browser view, activate the Column Browser (⌘B or View>Column Browser>Show Column Browser). Also, in the Column Browser submenu, ensure at least the Artist, Album and Use Album Artist items are checked. Do the same for any playlists to be monitored for songs that will need to be restored under Step 13.

Step 5: Using the Finder, navigate to the folder containing the music media files. In my case the path was iTunes>iTunes Media>Music but new libraries may have a different folder/file structure. Except for compilations, the Music folder will have a separate subfolder for each album artist with a further subfolder for each album by that artist. The Music folder has a separate subfolder for compilations. This has a further subfolder for each album that is tagged as a compilation.

Step 6: Create a temporary folder. This will be used as a temporary location for songs to be reimported following Step 10 below.

Step 7: In the Column Browser, select each artist in turn looking for songs with the dotted cloud symbol in the Cloud Download column.

Step 8: Take note of any playlists the affected song(s) appear in.

Step 9: Go to the applicable music media folder and copy the affected song file to the temporary folder created in Step 6.

Step 10: In the Column Browser, select the affected song(s)and delete them. Note: this also deletes the song(s) from the relative media folder.

Step 11: Import the deleted song(s) (⌘O or File>Import…).

Step 12: When the import process is complete, use File>Library>Update Cloud Library to complete the matching process with the Apple Music Catalogue.

Step 13: When the matching process is complete, restore the songs to their respective playlists and delete the files copied to the temporary folder in Step 9.

Repeat Steps 7 to 13 as often as necessary to completely eliminate any songs with the dotted cloud symbol in the Cloud Download column.

 

[knux11]

damn so nobody fixed this yet? got me ready to switch to android. my locally stored and synced songs cant play. same error. i dont have itunes match on at all. it's all synced from my computer. i paid extra for the higher storage iphone specifically so i could play what i want when i want without a data connection.

 

[forrie]

For posterity, I encountered this issue in two different situations and here's what and how it resolved:

1) Sign in/out of your Media & Purchases, Settings > iCloud (at the top) > Media & Purchases
that fixed one instance of the issue.

The other issue is more tricky:

2) If you have previously used Apple Music and no longer subscribe, sometimes you'll get an additional pointer/entry to those songs in your Music Library.

When you encounter this (#2), perform a search for that song and you are likely to see two entries, one is grayed out.

Delete the grayed-out item, and that should fix it.

Apple tells me that this is "expected product behavior" tho I recommend to them a tool or option to prune/fix your Library as this simply results in wasted time on Support for both parties.

I hope this helps.