Apple Music weirdness
August 15, 2026 at 5:18 PM by Dr. Drang
I was out on a walk yesterday, listening to the ’70s Hits Radio Station on Apple Music, when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to look at a text while the song was playing and was surprised at what the Music app told me about the song.
I’m pretty sure George Benson never covered “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” but even if he did, that’s not the version I was listening to. It was the version everybody knows by Thelma Houston, with her incredible voice and that fun bass part during the chorus. I’ve been listening to it for 50 years, and it’s unmistakable.
So how did Apple Music get the artist wrong? Is the info provided with the album wrong and Apple is just repeating someone else’s mistake? When I got home, I checked this Heartbreak Hits compilation album on other services. Amazon Music, Spotify, and Tidal all had the album, and they all had the artist listed correctly as Thelma Houston. Only Apple got it wrong.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen mistaken artist attribution like this before, but Apple’s weird choice of album to pluck the song from is very familiar. I listen to a lot of Apple’s Radio Stations and its Essentials and Deep Cuts playlists, and it’s common for a song to be assigned to a compilation album instead of the original source. Even when Apple has the original album in its library. As you might have guessed, I find this annoying.
It’s not exactly wrong to show a song as being on a compilation album; most hit songs have been put on “best of” and other sorts of compilations. But it’s bad scholarship. Yes, if the song was released as a standalone single—as many Beatle songs were—the only album you can assign it to is a compilation, but that’s fairly rare.
If, for example, you look at the Prince Essentials playlist—which you should; it’s fantastic—you’ll see that both “Gett Off” and “1999” are shown as being from his The Hits/The B-Sides album. That’s certainly a fun album to listen to, but neither of those songs “belong” to that album. “Gett Off” is from Diamonds and Pearls, and if I have to tell you where “1999” is from, I don’t know why you’ve read this far.
Apple likes to say that music is part of its DNA. I suggest they schedule some genetic counseling.