Why can't I delete music from my iPhone?

[furry55]

Hi there. Having recently signed up to Apple Music I wish to remove my purchased songs from the phone in order to free up storage space. I had previously put these songs into one large playlist which I now can't remove. When I plug my phone into iTunes the checkboxes are greyed out and there is no "delete" option when I right-click the playlist. On my iPhone the playlist doesn't exist, but instead the music is split into all of its constituent albums and singles. Deleting all of them individually would take hours and I fear they may come back when syncing. Have a feeling it's something to do with iCloud Music Library that seemed to kick in when I signed up for Apple Music. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[kch50428]

Apple Music FAQ: Everything you need to know | iMore

 

[furry55]

Thanks but I had already tried there. All I discovered was I can't sync via iTunes anymore and it's all done over the air. I need to do it via iTunes though as that's the only place where the playlist is listed. It's all split into albums and singles on the phone. Having played about with it all I've managed to do is delete songs from my computer, as there's now a cloud icon telling me I can re-download them, but as for the phone I'm still at a loss.



Can't deselect these songs

 

[Tartarus]

If you have enabled iCloud Music Library on your iPhone, you should disable it if your free subscription has expired.
If it hasn't expired, simply go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage, then select the upper Manage Storage and after a few seconds search for Music in that list, tap on it, and from there you could either delete all songs in once or by artist or by albums sorted by Artist.

 

[RyanGermann]

I discovered that if you have relocated your iTunes library (moved it from your local PC to a network / backed-up drive location), it may be that the iPhone considers that to be a completely separate library.

If you have EVER used the "Hold Shift Key while launching iTunes" function so it prompts you to choose the Library (rather than just letting it create and store the library in your "My Music" folder on Windows) this may break iTunes' ability to manage data on the iPhone.

I don't know all the details, but that's a possible cause even Apple didn't know about: the senior Apple Care specialist I spoke with said she will escalate to see if that should be included in their FAQ / support pages.