U2 starts playing on my phone in my car for no apparent reason.

[brgjoe]

When trying to issue a "Hey Siri" command or after talking on the phone while connected to my uConnect via Bluetooth, for some unknown reason my phone tries to play a U2 song from their album. Uh...why?

I don't have any custom playlists. As far as I know I haven't downloaded any music or any U2 albums whatsoever. Don't even use my iPhone to store/play music. Never have used Apple Music and haven't touched iTunes in YEARS.

So why is this happening? Why does my phone think I need to hear a U2 song whenever I use it in my car? Annoying.

 

[pk0]

In 2014, Apple "gifted" everyone with a free U2 album. Your car likely has a Bluetooth/CarPlay Autoplay so it pulls up the only thing in your Apple Music library and starts playing. Some cars give you the ability to disable Autoplay.

I don't use Apple Music either, so I just removed the U2 album from my library and it stopped autoplaying altogether. This was back in 2015 though, it looks like it is much harder to remove that album now though: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251184844

 

[JM]

I deleted that album off my wife’s phone recently. It’s still in her library, of course, but it’s deleted off the phone so won’t play.

 

[brgjoe]

My first iPhone was the 6/6+, so was that aforementioned U2 album included? The song it keeps trying to play is "Sleep Like a Baby Tonight". I don't think I've ever even heard of that song...like ever. LOL.

It just started doing this though. It's been the same phone I've used (13 Pro Max) and same car (perhaps unfortunately) with the same radio in it, but it's just now starting to exhibit this behavior. So I don't think it's the uConnect radio in it. Unless something has changed there that I haven't been aware of.

And it doesn't do it while it's just sitting there connected to the bluetooth unit in the car. It only does it when something active happens like me doing a "Hey Siri" or me getting a phone call -- that's when it attempt to play for whatever reason(s).

 

[Tagbert]

Car audio will usually try to issue a “play” command when a Bluetooth device connects and then the phone will bring up either the most recent audio app and start playing it’s most recent stream or, if it has been long enough, will open Music and start playing the most recent stream there.

If you were to play another song on Music but stop before ending, does that song start playing in this scenario instead of the U2 song?

 

[brgjoe]

That's the thing. It tried to play the song and it wouldn't even start playing. It would show it on the phone as the song it was playing, but it would never be able to actually start playing that song. Just silence.

Anyway, the last two or so updates to iOS 16 must have fixed the problem. I didn't change anything else. So yesterday I was using the phone in the car and using Siri there and everything worked like it should.

No U2 album started to play. yay!