HomePod HomePod/Siri refuses to play purchased music

[nabla]

Yet another HomePod (or Apple Music?) mystery...

I do not have an Apple Music subscription, however, I have tons of music purchased from the iTunes Store. Until ~2-3 weeks ago, I could just ask Siri on my HomePods to "play album X by artist Y", and usually that would work quite well. The HomePods are logged in to the Apple ID under which I purchased the songs/albums, and thus were able to stream my purchases on request.

Now, I just get a response along the lines of "Apple Music apparently cannot play this" – the literal answer in German: "Apple Music kann das anscheinend nicht wiedergeben". (A Google search for that exact German phrase yields only two results, both not related to HomePods specifically.)

I tried powering down the HomePods, logging out and into the Apple ID again, basically everything short of factory-resetting the HomePods (which I'd love to avoid), to no avail. Yet I'm somehow convinced the HomePods should be able to stream iTunes purchases even without an active Apple Music subscription, just like they did for years before.

Not sure if this related: even the iPhone behaves strange recently. The same request "play album X by artist Y" on iPhone suddenly wants to invoke Spotify (response: "ok, but I need to access the Spotify app, allow?"), although the purchased album is present as local media within the iPhone's own Music app.

Has anybody experienced similar behavior and found a solution to this?

Thanks
nabla

 

[flynz4]

Assuming you are in Germany, did you purchase the music from the Germany Apple Store?

Personally, I’ve always lived in the US but I remember people complaining about media being restricted to certain countries. It might have been films, I really cannot remember.

 

[nabla]

Assuming you are in Germany, did you purchase the music from the Germany Apple Store?

Yes, everything happening within Germany and with German Apple ID, iTunes purchases etc.

And it seems to affect the whole library, no difference whether I try to play international pop artists, small local a cappella ensembles, classical music… the most recent purchases as well as songs bought in ~2005.

 

[nabla]

I did some further research and found out:

• ...that the English equivalent of the Siri answer I get is "looks like Apple Music can't play that", but that does not give me any new Google results with actual solutions applicable to my scenario either.
• ...that the HomePods will actually play my purchased music on the request "play music from my library" – but only in random order, over the whole library of several different genres, so basically useless. On any attempt to restrict to e.g. a certain artist or genre, it will fall back to "can't play that".

So I guess we can conclude that either it is a sporadic bug that will eventually get fixed (or not, but I will submit that to Apple feedback as well), or Apple has intentionally changed the behavior such that HomePod playback of iTunes Store purchases is no longer possible without an active Apple Music subscription. The latter would be painful, given the amount of money spent on music downloads as well as a couple of further HomePod Minis since such streaming had been working for several years up to very recently.

Oh, and regarding the strange side effects:

• "play album X by artist Y" on iPhone still tries to forward that request to Spotify, although the iTunes purchases are locally available within Apple's own Music app.
• "play album X by artist Y" on iPad (where I don't have a Spotify app) actually works – well, sort of: it again does so in random order only, but at least within the correct album. Random playback is not otherwise active on the device.