How To Delete All Songs in Apple Music

Cassandra McBride September 8, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx290Uml4TMu0026t=6s

With over 45 million songs, Apple Music is among the richest music streaming services out there. iOS users can find virtually any song they’re looking for and add it to their library. As a result, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if your Apple Music library gets cluttered with time.

Depending on how much you enjoy streaming music, you might’ve accumulated hundreds or thousands of songs, most of which you don’t listen to anymore. At this point, you might be considering the idea of wiping the slate clean.

Thankfully, Apple offers features that let you do this. They just might not be where you expect them to be.

Bulk Deleting Songs on Apple Music

Mass delete is a handy feature in many situations. Getting rid of songs that you don’t want to listen to anymore is one of them. Luckily, when it comes to this, iOS isn’t lacking.

The first thing worth mentioning is that the feature can’t be found within the Music app. This is what creates confusion and makes people doubt whether the feature even exists in the first place. However, you can delete all songs in the Settings on your phone. Here’s how to access it:

Open the Settings on your iPhone. Then, tap General.
Tap on iPhone Storage.
Tap on Music.
Click Edit.
Click the minus (-) symbol next to All Songs.

You can choose to delete all songs. Or, you can go through the list tapping the minus (-) symbol to the left of each song you don’t want on your phone. After tapping the minus sign, tap Delete and the song will disappear.

This method is the fastest way to quickly offload music and free up space on your iPhone.

Deleting Songs from the Music App

So what about the Music app itself? Is there a way to delete songs from within it?

As mentioned, you can’t mass delete songs when you’re in the Music app. However, it lets you delete entire playlists and albums, which may come close in terms of convenience if you’re in the habit of grouping all your songs.

Let’s take deleting an album as an example. You can do this in just a few simple steps:

Open the Music app on your iPhone and tap on Library.
Tap on Albums.
Long-press the Album you’d like to delete. This will open the 3D pop-up window.
Tap on Remove from Library.

Verify that you’d like to delete the Album by selecting Delete Album.

You can also do this for artists, playlists, albums, and individual songs. The deletion process is straightforward and doesn’t take up much time at all even if you have a lot of songs.

Offloading the Music App

Before iOS 11, every app could either be installed or completely removed. With the release of this update, Apple rolled out a handy feature that meets these two options somewhere in the middle.

If you go to iPhone Storage > Music, you’ll see the Offload App option. So what does it do? While uninstalling an app nukes its data and binary, offloading removes just the app without removing all the data associated with it. It’s then transferred to iPhone backup to free up the storage on the phone.

This means all your music will still be buried somewhere in your iPhone and even the Music app icon will still be there. Once you tap on it, the app will be reinstalled and with it, all your data.

This is perfect for when you need to free up some space but don’t want to lose your music forever. You can then work on freeing up some storage space (or even get a new phone). After that, you can bring all your music back with one tap.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the answers to more of your questions about deleting songs in Apple Music.

Does Apple Music take up a lot of space on my phone?

The Apple Music app doesn’t take up much space at all. It’s the songs you’ve downloaded that can eat up storage space. If your device storage is full, removing songs can help free up the space you need to perform updates, take pictures, and download new apps.

One way to check your Apple Music storage is to go to Settings>General>About. This will give you a breakdown of what’s taking up the most space. Look for ‘Songs’ to see how much space your music is taking. Assuming you have a lot of songs that you don’t listen to anymore, deleting music is a great way to clear up space.

If I delete songs from Apple Music, can I recover them?

Unlike iTunes, which has a Purchase History tab, Apple Music does not. This means you won’t have the option to quickly access one tab to re-download everything. You can add any music you purchased from iTunes by tapping on the cloud icons, but Apple Music downloads won’t be available this way.

You can go to Settings>Music on your phone and turn on Sync Library (this option is only available when you’re subscribing to Apple Music). Sync Library will show all of your downloaded music on all of your Apple devices.

Can I delete the songs in Apple Music app on my Mac?

Absolutely! But, you can’t bulk delete them. Unfortunately, you will need to delete songs individually on a Mac. Here’s what to do:

1. Open the Music app on your Mac and click on Songs in the menu to the left.

2. Click the Delete key on your keyboard. Then, click Delete to confirm.

You can follow these steps for only one song or many. You can click the icons at the top (Album, Artist, Genre, etc.) to sort the songs making it easier to navigate to the next song you’d like to delete.

The Final Word

iOS is widely regarded as the world’s best operating system for mobile devices is the fact that Apple really thinks about and optimizes a single aspect of its functions and processes. As you can see, there are different options for getting rid of all your songs, either temporarily or permanently.

Truth be told, not having such options would be unimaginable, as we all know how reluctant Apple is about allowing 3^rd party apps access to the operating system. At least there’s no reason for this when it comes to the Music app.