Itunes Store purchases made on iOS or iPadOS do not appear on mac

This has apparently been going on for years, purchases made on the iTunes Store in iDevices do not sync to the mac Music app and it can take days for them to appear.

They are not hidden, they show up in Purchases on your account, but of course, you can’t download directly from the Purchases list on the mac, so you need to wait a couple days for the mac to catch up.

On the mac iTunes Store, they do not show as purchased and there is a real danger of being double charged for the same content.

Of course, there are so few iTunes purchases nowadays, that Apple will probably let this slide indefinitely. This post is here just for all of us who are in this situation. Even Apple’s feedback page has no category for iTunes Store on the Music app, they only have Apple Music and iTunes – the Windows app. I still left feedback, but I don’t think it really matters.

You did nothing wrong, it’s a bug and you need to wait it out. I’ve already tried logging in and out, restarting devices, airdropping songs to the mac (which actually does nothing except put the url into the pasteboard), flushing the download cache on Music, de- and reauthorizing everything, etc. Just wait, it will come, there is nothing you can do.

macOS Sonoma, iOS 18.1, iPadOS 17.7