One of the main benefits of giving a streaming service your hard-earned money is to gain access to ‘premium’ features that fundamentally improve the platform’s usage experience.
Features such as ad-free playback, higher quality audio, offline playback, and more are now imperative for many. That’s precisely why when core paid features break, subscribers feel the need to let the world know.
YouTube Music Premium is generally a bug-free experience, but as of recently, those paying for the service for its offline-listening capabilities have been saying otherwise.
As pointed out by the folks over at PiunikaWeb, YouTube Music’s downloaded music is currently broken for some.
Reports about the bug made their way to Reddit and even Google’s support forum over the last two days, with users suggesting that tapping play on a downloaded song will not play it back, with the song perpetually then stuck on loading.
Troubleshooting fails
“Deleting the songs allows for the songs to play but when the songs are downloaded they will not play back,” wrote one user, suggesting that there might be something bigger going on than a simple song download error. “I have cleared the app’s cashe, cleared the data, uninstall and reinstalled the app, I have rolled the app back a version. I have deleted every downloaded song and when I redownload the songs, the error persists,” added the user, who is running YouTube Music on an S24 Ultra.
It’s worth noting that although only relevant when offline, users have tried to play downloaded music with an active Wi-Fi connection and/or cellular data, only to see the bug persist. Several commenters, on both the support forum post and Reddit, confirmed having similar issues.
A cause for the bug has not been deduced yet. Some say that downloaded music stopped playing after YouTube Music rolled out its yearly Recap, while a different user suggests that the issue “Started happening after the December QPR2 update.”
Although YouTube hasn’t acknowledged the issue on the support thread, TeamYouTube did respond to affected users on Reddit, suggesting that they submit a “feedback report so that the right team can look into” the issue.
Are you encountering the same issue with downloaded tracks on YouTube Music? Let us know in the comments below.
