I updated my MacMini to Apple’s latest OS, Catalina, a few weeks ago and with it came Apple Music, the successor to iTunes. One of the great features of iTunes and now Music, if you have an Apple Music Membership, is the ability add songs or albums to your library without actually downloading the files, saving tons of disc storage. You can just stream your collection, well, until you can’t…
What happens is that when you are trying to stream songs, Music simply skips from one song to the next if it does anything at all, without playing a single note. Being a long time Apple and iTunes user the trusted solution is to go to Account in the Menu Bar and click on ‘View My Account’ and enter your username and password. Once authenticated, iTunes always worked as expected; not so with Music.
When trying to log into my account I first get Error 9039 with only an option to click OK followed by Error -50 again with the option to click OK and the very helpful suggestion to try again later…
An internet search for Error 9039 reveals a lot of conflicting information and wild speculations, if anything it could be pointing to a sync or streaming problem.
Music Error -50 (got to love the minus!) appear to be an error related to authentication, again I couldn’t find a useful fix. Most of the troubleshooting posts that come up seem to be related to mobile devices.
I called Apple Support, after all I am paying for the service so I expect it to work! While Apple’s support at the Genius Bar is almost always great, chat or phone support sadly almost always isn’t.
Here are steps you can take to solve the problem:
- Make sure your Internet connection works
- Try ‘View My Account’, log in and see if that solves the problem.
- Restart your Mac
- If you still can’t stream music click on Accounts in the menu bar and go to Authorizations, then De-authorize this Computer and Authorize it again.
This solved my problem and I didn’t see any more error messages.
Tip!
You should know though, that de authorizing the computer will change some settings and you need to re-check ‘Sync Library’ in the General Preferences and under Advanced check ‘Add songs to library when adding to playlists’, otherwise you’ll be missing a lot of music…