iTunes play count not updating from iPhone to PC

Updated Iphone to iOS 17.2, played a song on the phone, and it updated the play count on PC immediately.

Update 17.2 seems to have solved the problem.

Same here. On another thread I read that this should be sorted with the next update. I'm not sure if they're phasing out the 'last played' and 'number of plays' functions but that would be a shame as they're features I enjoy. To others it may seem pointless and geeky but to me it's part of the joy of listening to music. When music was more 'manual' I always used to wonder what I'd listened to most. Now I can monitor that but..not anymore.

Some stuff does update and sync (like playlists and 'favourites'). This whole problem seemed to start with the recent update which changed 'loves' to 'favourites' - ironically something that I doubt many people were asking for. It appears that the time stamp meta data is no longer updating. I also wasted loads of time trying to fix it but I've now given up and am hoping for a fix in the next update.

Same problem. Updates to Play Counts are sporadic.

Question: Where does Apple Music on Mac get the Play Counts for a song from?

Here's the sequence that exhibits the problem

1) Mac/PC is powered off

2) Play songs on your iPhone using Music App

3) Sometime later, maybe days later, power up Mac/PC.

4) Observe play counts. A few play counts are updated, I've never seen play counts for all the songs I've played updated. Only a small subset.

In the past, there was an XML file stored locally on your computer that contained play counts. Whenever you synchronized your iPhone to your computer that file was updated.

But now, my guess is that if you're an Apple Music Subscriber, the Play Counts are stored in the Cloud. Why do I think that? Because Apple Music correctly shows your history online.

As a Software Developer, I wish I could talk to an Apple Developer, not a tech support person. Tech support does not understand the problem.

The problem is that Apple Music on PC/Mac isn't receiving the full list of updates to the play counts. But, online you can see your play history, and that appears to be accurate. So there's a bug somewhere.

Why does this matter? For Smart Playlists of course.

I've been having the same issue for about a month, since updating to iOS17. Plays from iphone SE do not update icloud music plays (so plays do not sync with itunes on PC). But added music, deletes and favourites on my phone do get reflected in itunes on PC. Further, plays on itunes on PC and my ipod touch (which hasn't had a software update), are updated on my iphone SE.

Looking through the discussions, it does seem that many people have the same issue and that "Apple" reportedly know about it and are looking into it. I'm not sure if that is true, but the latest update to iOS 17.1.2 a couple of days ago has not solved the problem.

I've tried all sorts of things to try to sort it out at my end, including deleting and reinstalling the music app on my phone, signing in and out of apple music and reinstalling itunes on my PC (from the microsoft website), but nothing has helped. I gave up a while ago as I believe it is a bug with the iOS 17 update that only Apple can solve.

Interestingly, today I notice that the "Replay" feature has been revamped. Previously, as I'm sure you know, this used to show a weekly summary of the running tally of most played songs, artists, albums - listing the top five in each category, before taking you to your top 100 played songs for the year so far. Now it shows the top 15 for each of the categories, including the running tally of plays.

Anyway, presumably, they would not revamp this play-based list if they were going to phase out the number of plays facility.

Geeky or not, but apple music would lose some of its appeal to me if they did get rid of the number of plays facility.

I think so, but I'm not 100% sure about that. I've barely used my phone for music since the play counts stopped working properly, aside for playing one song every day or so to see if it had started to work again. So the number of back-plays would have been small.

I can confirm though that yesterday's plays (about 30 songs on my phone) synced with my PC first thing this morning. So the problem does seem to have been fixed for me.

Hopefully it will work for you after the update.

Good Luck

I have also been having the same issue. This feature has been a favourite of mine for many years, from my ipods to my phone. I updated to a new iPhone at the same time as ios17 came out and thought it was because I moved to a newer iPhone. I have been getting more disheartened with this feature not working and actually started thinking about looking for a different app for listening to my music. Having read this thread, I was unaware that 17.2 was released, so I am currently updating my phone as I type. I will update when and let you know if this fixes the count problem for me as it appears to have done for others. Fingers crossed.

I would like to see it fixed too. Thanks for opening the thread.

Thanks so much for pointing this out. I’ve done the update and will check later. Do you know if it has also updated anything you’ve listened to over the past few weeks?