Like a lot of people, I’ve curated a long playlist of my favorite songs in Apple Music since it was called iTunes and just got a fancy new “brushed metal” interface. On this playlist is “Down With Disease” by Phish, except my wife Jessi noticed it was misspelled as “Desease” on our CarPlay display. I searched for it in Apple Music, and the spelling was fine. We chalked it up to a brain fart and moved on.
Something reminded Jess of this quirk today, and we discovered this song has a sort of dual existence in my Apple Music library. As you see below, the song listed in my playlist and the album in my library do indeed have the incorrect “Desease” spelling. Note that I have the song downloaded—one of my music pet peeves is songs buffering or skipping. Probably comes from my CD days.
But when I search Apple Music, the song shows it is downloaded but has the correct spelling. Plus, when I search for the incorrect spelling, there are no results. So what’s going on?
Then I remembered iTunes Match still exists—the pre-subscription service that uploads all your non-iTunes-Store songs for all your devices and verifies their metadata. iTunes Match is also included in Apple Music. Of course, I ripped all my CDs back in the day, including this Phish album. iTunes then grabbed metadata for them from… whatever those services were. We could edit that metadata, and still can it seems, even for streaming songs in Apple Music.
What I think happened here is the data for this song was somehow downloaded or edited incorrectly (I rarely edited metadata; just didn’t need to). In my library, which includes viewing the song in my playlist, Apple Music respects this incorrect spelling. But when I search the Apple Music catalog, it still marks the song as downloaded but displays the correct spelling. To top-level Apple Music search, my incorrectly spelled version simply seems to not exist.
And that’s the story of how we learned we aren’t going crazy. At least, not from Apple Music.
