Breaking change in Apple Music Recently Played API behavior

The Apple Music Recently Played API appears to have changed its behavior on 2026-08-05/2026-08-06. The endpoint no longer reports songs that are saved in a user's library. This impacts music tracking applications that rely on this API to retrieve listening history.

Currently, tracks only appear in the Recently Played response when users stream them directly from the Apple Music catalog. If a user plays a song from their personal library, the playback is not reported by the endpoint and cannot be tracked.

This is a breaking change that significantly affects existing integrations, but we could not find any announcement in the release notes or updates to the documentation regarding this behavior change.

Could you please confirm whether this change is intentional? If so, we would appreciate updated documentation or guidance on how apps should handle tracking playback from a user's library.

Some users report that after removing songs from their library and restarting the Apple Music app, those tracks start getting tracked again. This definitely looks like a regression.

https://musicat.fm/notes/74dc4bb7-7b6a-4d28-8b88-af5a69fc8048

https://musicat.fm/notes/689e4212-8125-42ce-8d42-a473d9ef8c5e

https://musicat.fm/notes/a9b367a7-e6e0-4aff-b98f-f80892bc687c

Another workaround users are using:

https://musicat.fm/notes/b1207d86-772f-4a3e-bf8b-69041f9a24da

This is extremely annoying and has broken my app entirely.

I am also having issues with MusicRecentlyPlayedRequest but am observing Library tracks being returned but Catalog tracks not being returned. I also noticed the change in behavior on the 7th.

I did quite a bit of testing. In my case, plays are tracked correctly from catalog albums, library albums, and catalog playlists that are not saved to the library. However, tracks played from a catalog playlist that is saved to the user’s library are never returned by MusicRecentlyPlayedRequest.

I confirmed this with the same song: played from the saved playlist → missing; played directly from its album → immediately tracked.

Also worth noting: I’m now only getting ~160 items in the response, instead of the ~200 I was previously seeing.

This broke my app. Please restore this endpoint Apple!

Adding types=songs,library-songs to the api request seems to solve this.

Breaking change in Apple Music Recently Played API behavior
 
 
Q