How to Mark Favorites in Apple Music

Why? No reason. Literally.

This How To article was rejected by the Cult of Mac editors because it offers no useful or actionable advice and ends as a frustrated rant. Enjoy.

Apple single-handedly dragged the music industry into the 21st century kicking and screaming. The iTunes Music Store completely changed the way people downloaded music… legally, at least. The iPod pushed music into people’s pockets. And since then? Apple Music has fumbled along as a barely viable product that has confused people from its launch to this very day. iOS 16 brings a coveted new feature to the Music app: the ability to mark an artist as a favorite.

If you have a big music library, you might have hundreds of albums and dozens of artists or more. And if you’re anything like me, you listen to a small handful of the same albums 80% of the time. Quicker access to your top artists would be great… if it worked properly.

Read on to see how this broken feature barely works in any capacity and would hardly provide any utility in the off-chance that it did.

Star your favorite bands in Apple Music

To mark an artist as a favorite, open Music.

1. From the For You or Listen Now tabs, you can tap on any album and tap on their name under the album title.
2. Alternatively, from the Library tab, you can also tap Artists, tap on their name and tap See More by…
3. Or, just search by their name in the Search tab.

From the artist page, just tap the star in the top right. Tap the star again to unfavorite them. It’s that simple.

Now, you might wonder — what does marking an artist as a favorite do? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, this does absolutely nothing. This is simply baffling.

According to Apple’s official support documentation, marking a favorite artist adds them to a list you can see on the Listen Now tab. If this is supposed to be a convenient way to access the artists you listen to most, this is far from it because I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve quit the app, I’ve restarted my phone, I’ve scrolled top-to-bottom on that page countless times and I can’t see it.

There is a prominent tile labeled “Favorites Mix,” but this is not the same thing. This is a generated playlist that for me includes a bunch of random songs that are not by my favorite artists. And double checking to make sure is a big pain, because as I mention, there’s nowhere you can see all of your favorites listed. A significant portion of these songs I have rarely ever played.

Even if it is there, it’s evidently so much harder to find than simply going to the Library tab that I will continue to exclusively use the Library tab.

But hey, we can karaoke.