How to stop Apple Music playing other songs when an album ends

Autoplay is Apple Music’s habit of carrying on after the thing you chose has finished. When an album or playlist reaches its last track, it keeps going with songs it thinks are similar, and it doesn’t stop until you stop it.

For background listening, that’s the point. For an album, it’s the wrong ending. Records are sequenced to finish somewhere: a closing track, a long fade, sometimes a silence before a hidden song. Autoplay cuts in over all of that with whatever the algorithm reaches for next, and the album you just heard gets a stranger’s song as its last word.

The control is the infinity symbol (∞) in the queue, and it stays switched on until you switch it off.

1. Start playing anything, so the MiniPlayer appears at the bottom of the screen.
2. Tap the MiniPlayer to open Now Playing.
3. Tap the queue button (three lines, bottom right) to see what’s coming up.
4. At the top of the queue, tap the ∞ Autoplay button so it’s no longer highlighted.

The “Autoplay” section of the queue disappears, and once the current album finishes, playback stops.

On a Mac, the same infinity button sits at the top of the Playing Next list in the Music app. The layout of these controls has moved between iOS versions, so if yours looks different, look for the ∞ symbol near the shuffle and repeat buttons.

• Repeat is on. The repeat button sits in the same row as Autoplay. With Repeat set to repeat all, the album starts again from track one instead of stopping. Tap it until it isn’t highlighted.
• You started a station, not an album. A station never ends, whatever Autoplay is set to. Asking Siri for an artist or a song can start one. Asking for “the album” by name, or pressing Play on the album’s own page, plays the record itself.
• Something else is in the queue. Songs added with Play Next or Play Later play after the album. Clear them from the queue if you want the record to be the last thing you hear.
• Song Transitions is on. This doesn’t add songs, but it blends one track into the next, so an album can sound as if it’s running into something else. It’s under Settings, Apps, Music, Song Transitions. More on that in gapless playback on Apple Music.

An album is a finished piece of work. Someone chose the last song, and often the length of the silence after it. Hearing that ending, and then nothing, is part of how a record sticks with you.

Autoplay also blurs what you actually listened to. After a few weeks of it, your recently played list is half albums you chose and half songs the algorithm chose for you, and it’s harder to remember which records you heard all the way through. With Autoplay off, every listening session is a decision: you pick a record, it plays, it ends, and you pick again.

If you like that rhythm, the next steps are keeping shuffle off and the album in order, and making the time to hear a whole album, start to finish.

Spinworthy plays your Apple Music albums and has no Autoplay setting to forget, because it has no autoplay. You flip through your records like a crate, drop the needle on one, and it plays from the first track to the last, gapless. When the record ends, it ends. Nothing plays next until you choose it.

It needs an Apple Music subscription, and it’s free on iPhone.