MusicKitJS | Cannot play explicit songs | CONTENT_RESTRICTED

[Ticket on Feedback Assistant FB12353357]

Hi there,

We’re experiencing issues playing explicit songs using MusicKitJS for the Web (tested on both stable v1 and beta v3).

Upon calling the SDK’s “play()” function, the following error gets logged in the console “CONTENT_RESTRICTED: Content restricted” and playback doesn’t begin. The Storefront we’ve tested in is “it”, but very likely all of them are impacted with the issue, here’s a few Adam IDs of affected tracks: 1681182396, 1683117248, 1669607876. A quick check with the REST APIs reveals indeed that the relevant thing all 3 of them have in common is "contentRating" being "explicit”.

The bug isn’t however easy or predictable to replicate because it seems that it can be somewhat solved by fiddling with both the “Screen Time” restrictions settings within an iOS/iPadOS device (of course logged in with the same Apple account), as well as with the “Parental Controls” dashboard located in the Web version of the Apple Music’s settings page. We’re still not 100% sure what exactly “triggers” the fix, but both mentioned dashboards above are essential in attempting to solve it by trial and error. Specifically:

• in the “Parental Controls” dashboard what helps is actually turning ON the restrictions with the toggle, and then easing them up the most by specifically setting the less restricted available option in all 3 dropdown menus (pretty baffling);
• in the “Screen time” dashboard what helps is simply enabling/disabling the feature itself altogether, as well as the “Content & Privacy restrictions” toggle, and changing the level of allowed content between “Clean” and “Explicit”;
• I also want to highlight the fact that during the entire process, for the issue to be actually solved, users every time had to to restart their iPhone/iPad multiple times after changing a setting in “Screen time”, along with deauthorizing/authorizing (logging out and back in) their Apple Music account from the MusicKitJS SDK.

The issue seems to always affect freshly created Apple accounts right from the start, we’re not aware of methods that can lead to the bug “coming back” and starting to happen again after being solved manually with the process above (meddling “randomly” with dashboards). It’s a pretty serious one because many of our users do not posses an Apple device and only use their Apple Music subscription on the Web and/or their Android device, meaning that the “Screen time” dashboard isn’t available for them. We’ve never been able to solve the problem on an Apple ID account solely by fiddling with the “Parental Controls” dashboard located in the Web version of the Apple Music’s settings page: tinkering with the “Screen time” settings was essential every single time, meaning owning an Apple device is essential to solve it.

Last thing I’m adding is that the issue doesn’t seem to also affect listening to these explicit songs directly with the various first-party Apple Music clients (tested on the iOS native app, Android native app, and on the Apple Music WebApp).

Steps to reproduce:

• on the Web, create a new Apple ID account and activate an Apple Music subscription (do not login with said account on an Apple device);
• go to the Apple Music WebApp settings page at music.apple.com/account/settings and make sure that the “Parental Controls” restrictions are turned OFF;
• open any explicit song in the Apple Music WebApp and confirm that playback is allowed;
• login and authorize the newly created account using any website/application integrated with the MusicKitJS SDK (v1 or v3, doesn’t matter);
• open the same explicit song as before (or any other) in said third-party client that uses the SDK and verify that playback doesn’t begin and an error “CONTENT_RESTRICTED: Content restricted” is logged in the console upon playing.

Additional infos:

• Apple ID account region and language: Italy - Italian;
• Storefront affected: IT but possibly all of them;
• MusicKitJS versions affected: both v1 and v3;
• Browser where the issue was reproduced: Chrome v114.

Attached you’ll find some informational screenshots. Thanks!