How to stop Apple Music from automatically adding ‘Favorite’ songs to your library

With the release of iOS 17.1 in October, Apple added a new “Favorites” feature for Apple Music. iOS 17.2 further expanded on this with the addition of a new “Favorites” playlist and the ability to have songs automatically added to your library when you favorite them.

The latter change, however, has proven to be controversial among a lot of iPhone users, but luckily, Apple makes it easy to turn off.

In iOS 17.2, any song you mark as a “Favorite” in Apple Music will automatically be added to your Music library. While this setting appears to be enabled by default, Apple has also added a dedicated toggle for it in the Settings app.

Open the Settings app.

Scroll down and tap the “Music” menu.

Toggle the “Add Favorite Songs” setting off.

When you switch off this toggle, you can “Favorite” songs in Apple Music without those songs automatically being added to your Library. Those songs are, however, still added to the automatically generated “Favorites” playlist in iOS 17.2.

9to5Mac’s Take

When I posted about this tip on Threads, it got a lot more attention than I expected. Unsurprisingly, people really don’t like when songs are added to their Music library without their deliberate approval.

As some of the responses to my post point out, this also underscores one of the problems with Apple’s practice of putting settings for apps like Apple Music in the Settings app rather than inside the Music app itself.

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