Apple Music Starts Automatically In Car? (5 Solutions)

Modern technology is increasingly intelligent and can bring a lot of convenience and fun to our lives. But, sometimes, it can also cause brand-new problems that need solving.

One of these rather frustrating “smart” technology problems is the recurring—and rather startling—experience of having your music blast your ears the moment you open your car door.

In particular, this is a very common problem with iPhones and the Apple Music service, a problem we hope to help you solve today!

Solution #1: Turn Off Car-Play

Your iPhone comes with a “CarPlay” feature that can be toggled, which means it can be turned off.

Apple Music’s auto-play function is also disabled when you disable CarPlay, so this is a surefire way to never be blasted by music or audiobooks the moment your car starts, ever again.

1. To do this, you’ll want to head to the ‘settings’ app on your iPhone.
2. Now, find the ‘screen time’ menu option and tap it.
3. Next, tap on ‘content and privacy restrictions’
4. Next up is ‘allowed apps,’ tap on it.
5. And finally, you should see a list of apps for which you can toggle permissions on and off. Find CarPlay, and toggle it OFF.

Now, it should be noted that this fix isn’t ideal for everyone, mainly because it requires entirely disabling the Car Play feature, something you might actually want to use.

After all, most people still like to be able to easily play music through their car, something still possible but not nearly as convenient with the CarPlay feature turned off.

If you actually want to keep using CarPlay, either solution #3 or #4 might be better for you.

However, if you don’t really find yourself using the CarPlay features much, this might be just the fix you need.

Either way, you can always turn CarPlay back on if you miss it, so if you’re on the fence, give it a try and just turn it back on later if you want it.

If you’re also a Spotify user and are running into issues with the app and CarPlay, check out our article about solutions for common Spotify and CarPlay problems.

Solution #2: Turn Off Your Car’s Auto-Play Function

If you’re driving any kind of “smart” car with a computer interface in your dashboard, chances are your car may have a built-in auto-play feature.

And if it does, that’s good news for you, because it means you can turn it off.

Even if your iPhone tries to auto-play when you get into the car, your car itself shouldn’t let it, if you’ve turned auto-play off.

It’s difficult to give a precise walkthrough on how to do this because whether or not your car will have the feature at all, and how to find it if it does, will vary from one car to another.

But if your vehicle is a “smart” car, odds are good it will have such a feature, so hunt around in your options menu or in your user manual and see if you can find it.

Solution #3: Turn Your Speakers Down

This is the simplest and most “brute force” method, but it does work and has certain advantages over other solutions.

All you need to do for this method to solve the problem is to remember to turn your car speakers down to zero every time you get out of the car.

There are a couple of reasons this can be the most useful solution for some people.

For one, it’s simple: no tweaking with settings, no getting frustrated by obscure menu options; just turn your speakers down, and you’re done.

But moreover, it also means you can leave the autoplay function intact.

This way, you can get into your car to silence, while, in the background, your music starts auto-playing, effectively muted by your car volume, but playing nonetheless.

Now, you can sit down, start the car, and then turn your speakers back up to your preferred volume, at your own pace, without just getting suddenly blasted.

Or, if you don’t want to listen to whatever’s being auto-played, you can take a moment to set something else up instead, and then turn your speakers back up.

All-in-all, it’s a surprisingly simple way to control your autoplay experience; just remember to practice the habit of turning those speakers down every time you park your car!

Solution #4: Don’t Have Apple Music Open

Before we get into the more technical solutions, here’s another plain and simple one: just don’t get into your car with Apple Music open on your phone.

After all, it’s the Apple Music app that’s responsible for this behavior, not necessarily your car’s infotainment system. Often, Apple CarPlay will begin auto-playing music if your Apple Music App is open.

You will need to get in the habit of closing the Apple Music app on your iPhone before you set foot in your automobile.

Things will be nice and quiet when you sit down and get ready to drive, and you can then take a moment to—if you want to—re-open the Apple Music app and let it play.

Solution #5: Tell Siri to Stop Playing

You can use a Siri voice command to conveniently stop auto-play in its tracks.

To do this, simply say, “Hey Siri, stop music.”

Starting a Siri command will, in itself, mute your music for a moment and then, once you finish giving the command, the music will stop entirely.

This one is more of a stopgap than a real solution because you’ll have to do this every time you get into your car if you don’t find another way of stopping auto-play.

Plus, if you’re using solutions #3 or #4 but forgot to turn down your speaker or close the app this time, you’ve still got a trick up your sleeve to make it stop anyway.

Sources

How to Stop Apple Music from Automatically Playing in Car from iPhone