How do I delete my Apple Music history?

Apple Music is a streaming music service developed by Apple. It offers access to over 90 million songs and 30,000 playlists. Some of the benefits of Apple Music include personalized recommendations, unlimited skips and downloads for offline listening, integration with Siri, and exclusive content.

While Apple Music provides a seamless listening experience, some users may be concerned about their privacy and want to delete their streaming history. Listening data can reveal your music taste and habits. So for privacy reasons, you may wish to clear your Apple Music activity. This article will explain how to view, delete, and prevent Apple Music from saving your listening history.

Viewing Your Apple Music History

Apple Music keeps track of everything you listen to in the Music app and iTunes. To see your full listening history on iPhone or iPad:

1. Open the Music app and tap on the Playing tab at the bottom.

2. Tap on the album artwork of the currently playing song.

3. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal your Up Next queue and listening history.

You’ll see a list of recently played songs and albums. You can scroll down to view your full listening history chronologically.

On Mac, open the Music app and click on the Up Next icon in the top right corner. This will display your recent listening history. You can view your full history by selecting History from the pop-up menu.

Your Apple Music listening history goes back as far as when you first started using the service. So you can look back at everything you’ve listened to for years (1).

Deleting Individual Songs and Albums From Your History

You can delete individual songs, albums, artists, and playlists from your Apple Music listening history. This allows you to selectively remove certain items without clearing your entire history.

To delete individual items from your history on iOS:

Open the Music app and tap on the Listen Now tab.

Scroll down and tap on Recently Played to see your recent listening history.
Swipe left on any song, album, artist or playlist to reveal a Delete button.
Tap Delete to remove that item from your history.

On iTunes or Music app for Mac:

Click on the History icon in the sidebar to view your recently played items.
Right-click on any song, album, artist or playlist and choose ‘Remove from History’ from the menu.

This will delete that item from your history.

This allows you to curate your listening history by removing specific tracks or albums you don’t want kept on record. Your overall history will remain intact minus any individual deletions.

Deleting Listening History Entirely

If you want to delete your entire Apple Music listening history all at once, you can do so through the Music app settings:

On iOS:

Open the Music app and tap on the More icon (three dots) in the top right.
Go to Settings > General.

Tap on “Clear History and Downloads.”
Confirm that you want to clear your entire listening history.

On Mac:

Open Music and click Music > Preferences in the menu bar.
Go to the General tab.
Click the “Clear History and Downloads” button.

Confirm that you want to clear your entire listening history.

This will permanently delete your entire Apple Music listening activity from Recently Played, Heavy Rotation, Top Songs and Albums, and other personalized sections. It will also clear out the play counts for all your songs and playlists. Be certain before proceeding, as there is no way to recover your history after deleting it.

History Still Visible After Deleting

Even after deleting specific songs, albums, artists, or your entire listening history from Apple Music, you may still notice recommendations based on your past listening habits. This is because Apple Music uses your history to build a profile of your musical tastes and preferences. So even if you delete your history, the impact of your past listening activity does not immediately disappear from the Apple Music algorithm.

For example, if you listened to a certain genre frequently in the past before deleting that history, you may still receive recommendations for that genre. Or if you deleted a few rock albums from your history but generally listen to rock music, Apple Music’s recommendations may still reflect your overall rock-leaning preferences.

In essence, deleting listening history does not instantly erase your impact on the Apple Music recommendation engine. While your specific listens are deleted, the service still retains a general sense of your tastes gleaned from your past habits. So history may still indirectly influence suggestions and personalized playlists for some time afterwards, even if that specific history is no longer visible.

The more listening history you build after deleting, the more it will overwrite your old preferences in Apple Music’s algorithm. But the service does not immediately “forget” all associations from history the moment it is deleted.

Using ‘Private Session’

Apple Music has a ‘Private Session’ feature that allows you to listen without adding anything to your listening history or impacting recommendations. When Private Session is enabled, Apple Music will not keep track of what you listen to or make suggestions based on your activity.

To use Private Session on iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Music and toggle “Use Listening History” off. This prevents Apple Music from recording your listening activity and updating your taste profile. According to discussions on Reddit (source), this essentially serves as a private listening mode.

On Android devices, open the Apple Music app, tap the More button, go to Settings and disable “Use Listening History.” This will ensure your activity is not tracked while in Private Session.

With Private Session enabled, you can listen to any content without it influencing recommendations or showing up in your recently played. It allows you to keep your listening history private if desired.

Disabling Personalized Recommendations

Turning off personalized recommendations will limit Apple Music’s ability to track your listening history and make suggestions based on your tastes. This prevents Apple Music from accessing your full listening data and building profiles used for recommendations.

To disable personalized recommendations in the Apple Music app on iOS devices (source):

Go to your Apple Music profile
Tap “Edit”
Scroll down and toggle off “Personalized Recommendations”

Disabling this setting prevents Apple Music from accessing listening history to build your taste profile. General recommendations may still be made based on genre or popularity, but they will not be personalized.

On Mac, personalized recommendations can be disabled by going to Music settings and unchecking “Use Listening History.” This limits tracking of your Apple Music history (source).

Overall, turning off personalized recommendations is an effective way to limit Apple Music’s access to your full listening history. While you may still receive some generic recommendations, they will not be based on your personal tastes without this feature enabled.

Using Incognito Mode

One way to browse Apple Music more privately without saving your listening history is to use Incognito mode in iTunes on your computer. When you enable Incognito mode in iTunes, your activity such as songs and albums you listen to won’t be logged in your history and won’t influence future personalized recommendations ^[1].

To turn on Incognito mode in iTunes, go to iTunes > Preferences > Privacy and check the box next to “Private listening”. This will prevent iTunes from keeping track of your listening history and sharing data to improve recommendations while Incognito mode is enabled. Just remember to disable Incognito mode when you want your activity to resume being tracked.

Using Incognito mode is a handy way to listen to music in iTunes without having it influence or be saved in your permanent history. It gives you more control over your privacy when using Apple Music.

Additional Privacy Settings

You can take additional steps to limit ad tracking and location services for extra privacy when using Apple Music. In your iOS device settings, go to Privacy > Location Services and toggle off location access for Music. You can also go to Privacy > Advertising and enable ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ to prevent Apple from using your data for targeted ads. Some users on Reddit recommend restricting location services and ad tracking to prevent Apple from tracking your listening history and habits. However, this may impact personalized recommendations and other Music features that rely on your data.

According to discussions on the Apple website, Apple Music has a limit of 100,000 songs since your iCloud library needs to sync, add to playlists, etc. While Apple does not publish song limits for playlists, the iCloud library size limit likely impacts how many songs can be saved in playlists. However, you can still stream beyond 100,000 songs without saving them to your library.

Closing Summary

In summary, there are a few different ways to delete your Apple Music listening history and maintain greater privacy around your musical tastes and preferences:

You can delete individual songs or albums from your listening history one by one.
For a more complete deletion, you can clear your entire listening history all at once.
Enabling ‘Private Session’ prevents any new listening activity from being added to your history.

Turning off personalized recommendations stops Apple Music from using your history to suggest new music.
Using Incognito Mode in the Apple Music app provides temporary private browsing.

Clearing your Apple Music history can help protect your privacy and give you more control over your data. While your history may still be visible in some areas after deleting, these steps allow you to browse and listen privately without retaining permanent records. Take control over your listening data today for greater privacy.