Music won’t sync/play on Apple Watch ultra

I have an apple IPhone 14 ProMax, my music plays just fine on my phone, songs/playlists etc everything in my apple library, not Apple Music subscription, but my library, my songs. However with the latest update to my watch, none of the songs play on my watch anymore. It is quite frustrating as I purchased the Apple Watch Ultra to be able to be phone free and listen to music on my runs. I have read that joining Apple Music subscription fixes this issue as it seems that it is a pretty common problem, however I don’t want to have to pay $72/year to listen to the music that I was listening to for free just a little while ago. It worked just fine on my garmin and is still loaded on my garmin, looks like I will be moving away from Apple and back to garmin. Please help.