To date, Apple Music offers over 70 million songs to listen to. However, when searching for new songs, you may find that many interesting tracks are grayed out and do not play. In particular, tracks that are not included in your music library on the streaming service may be played. And tracks from your library, on the contrary, will not be played.
In most cases, next to the name of such “gray” tracks, you will see the letter E. This means Explicit – or, in other words, rated content. As a rule, this indicates obscene language or profanity in the track.
By default in iOS, such content is blocked, but this can be easily fixed in the settings. The blocking itself is directly related to the “Restrictions” feature, introduced as part of the advanced parental controls in iOS. However, starting with iOS 12, the necessary settings have moved from the menu item Settings > General > Restrictions, and they are now located not so clearly. How to fix the situation:
1. Go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy.
2. Click the switch next to Content and Privacy if it is not active.
3. Go to the Content Restriction tab > Music, Podcasts & News.
4. Select Explicit. (Since iOS 13, the item is called “With obscene content”)
If you want to block obscene content again, repeat the steps above, but instead of Explicit, select Clean (No obscene content).
Optionally, you can enter “Content Restriction” in the settings search bar and go directly to the third paragraph of this instruction so as not to search for the necessary items in the menu.
If you find that a song in your library is greyed out but not rated (or you already have the Explicit content filter turned off), there may be several reasons for this. The songwriter or copyright holder changed or deleted the album. This is rare, but it happens, and in such a situation the user cannot do anything. You can leave a song in the library in the hope that it will return to Apple Music, but in most cases, the only thing left for you is to remove the album from the library.
If you switched from one country’s Apple ID to another, chances are that the songs available in your original region are on the original account.
For the same reason, tracks are sometimes greyed out in searches: this may indicate that Apple Music has a song or album, but the content is not available in your country. Again, the only solution is to switch to a different region account.
If a song in the library is greyed out and when you try to play it, a warning appears in the upper right corner that there is no internet connection, click on this icon to reconnect. This error does not appear if the track is downloaded to the phone.
If none of the above helps, then try restarting your gadget. As a rule, this helps in the vast majority of cases. Also, check the quality of your internet connection. It is likely that there is simply no internet connection, so your music library is not playing.
