YouTube Music bug doesn’t play the next song, but there may be an easy fix

YouTube Music has been highly rated in many Android Authority surveys, both individually as the preferred music streaming service and as the best Spotify alternative. Its popularity stems from several factors: it’s bundled with YouTube Premium, works across platforms and devices (except Amazon Echo), and lets you play unofficial renditions and covers alongside official tracks. And since it’s so immensely popular, its issues can peeve thousands, and sometimes even millions of users. One such issue is now cropping up.

Over the last week, we’ve seen numerous reports of YouTube Music acting up. These reports are spread across Reddit and YouTube Music’s support forums and, more specifically, discuss the app’s inability to move to the next track.

Several of these reports echo the same issue: YouTube Music doesn’t automatically move to the next track when a particular song gets played through. And to make things even more frustrating for users, tapping the next (⏭) button doesn’t do anything either. And it persists even for users with YouTube Premium.

The YouTube Music bug has largely troubled iOS users, who have mainly encountered it with CarPlay. Some users, including my colleague Aamir Siddiqui, reported experiencing this when playing songs on YouTube Music directly on their iPhones. And despite the majority of reports coming from iOS users, at least one Android user also reported facing the same issue.

Needless to say, the issue is so trivial that it’s bound to drive people crazy. However, the makeshift fix may be equally simple. Aamir says he was able to fix the issue simply by restarting his iPhone and did not face the issue again over the following two days. For those who may still be affected by the issue even after rebooting their iPhone or iPad, there’s another potential fix shared by Reddit user iDrinkSaline. Here are the steps:

1. Open YouTube Music on your iOS device.
2. Tap your profile picture and then go to Settings > Playback and restrictions.
3. Toggle on Stream via Wi-Fi only.
4. Kill the app entirely.
5. Turn off your iPhone’s Wi-Fi for a few seconds and then turn it back on.
6. Open YouTube Music again and then play a track.

According to the Redditor, doing this helped them break the cycle and finally get the app working as it should. Since a simple reboot fixed it for us, we couldn’t test it at our end.

Notably, YouTube Music recently had a similar issue on Wear OS, where users couldn’t skip to the next track. While we can’t say whether the issues on both platforms stem from the same root cause, Google later confirmed it had resolved the issue.