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I accidentally asked iTunes to download all my music from match to the iPad. There are 2500+ songs in the queue now and they won't download before my flight tomorrow. The music downloads are blocking more important app upgrades.

I can't cancel each one individually since it would take hours.

How can you cancel all downloads in one go?

(iOS 6)

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3
  • Can you upgrade the apps in iTunes first and sync the iPad afterwards?
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Sep 21, 2012 at 22:16
  • No I don't use iTunes at all with my devices.
    – James
    Commented Sep 22, 2012 at 6:54
  • I think the simplest and quickest way is to disable iTunes Match in Settings > Music. You can then download the app updates in queue without having to wait for your music. Once done, you can re-enable iTunes Match. I haven't tested this myself, but I'm fairly certain Music.app won't try to pull the content once the service has been re-enabled.
    – user10355
    Commented Nov 6, 2013 at 23:35

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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I had the same problem with iOS 9. I mistakenly asked my iPhone to download 4,000 tunes and could not stop it. The apple genius (online chat) was not able to help me. I eventually found a solution:

  1. Go to the Music app
  2. You should have a grey bar monitoring the downloads near the top of the screen, tap on it
  3. Here you can see all the downloads - do not manually try to cancel all the downloads one by one, this would take too much time
  4. Scroll down until the end of the list
  5. You should see the "cancel all downloads option there" (a shame: it should rather be visible on the top of the list)
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    This worked for me but I had to do it multiple times to actually cancel all downloads. First I cancelled some thousands and then again for some fewer thousands.
    – Ashaman
    Commented Dec 31, 2015 at 11:46
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I just have the same exact problem. It's a bug in iOS. If you go to iTunes App on your iOS device, you will see a Downloads section. There you will see all pending iTunes Match downloads. It's a pain if you have thousands of songs to delete them from this download queue one by one. So here's how to squash this bug.

You absolutely don't need to reset your phone and go back to square one or email iTunes. Spare yourself the trouble. Here is a simple fix.

  1. Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store > iTunes Match

  2. On that screen, turn iTunes Match off.

  3. Tap your Apple ID on that screen and tap Sign Out. (I don't know if this is necessary but it works anyway. Just an added precaution for this to work.)

  4. Restart your iOS device (Hold down Sleep and Home button for about 5 seconds until it goes black and the apple logo in a black background appears).

  5. Go back to iTunes Store > Downloads and voila they're all gone. All those pending downloads are reset. And your iOS device won't download anymore of those songs unless you tell it to.

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  • Following these steps exactly, it did not work for me on my iPad on iOS 7.
    – Kyle Hayes
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 14:29
  • Doesn't work on iOS 8 either.
    – René
    Commented Oct 4, 2014 at 14:34
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You'll have to email into iTunes and request they be removed from your pending downloads queue, otherwise you'll be there for quite some time trying to cancel items from your queue.

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  • Yep, that is the only way. It's annoying, but the truth.
    – Josiah
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 19:14
  • This is ridiculous and such an amateur move by apple...
    – electronix384128
    Commented Oct 16, 2016 at 1:18
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This happened to me today. I disabled iTunes Match and enabled it again. That replaces the music library completely hence resetting the download queue. I have iOS 7 and ipad mini

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If you need to fix the problem right away, you can perform a full reset of your phone, but do not restore from a backup, otherwise you'll be back in the same situation. Instead, set up as a new iPhone. A pain, I know, but you'll have your phone back in some kind of working order a lot quicker, and can then re-download apps, media etc. at your leisure.

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