You tap the Apple Music Festival link, expecting a live concert in your living room — and iTunes just stares back at you with a blank page. When Apple staged its annual Apple Music Festival in London in 2016, the shows streamed live and free, but exclusively through Beats 1 Radio inside iTunes and the Music app. That streaming setup had a few gotchas: an outdated iTunes build, a missing Apple ID sign-in, or a broadcast window that had already closed could each leave you with nothing but an empty window.
This guide walks you through the fix in the order you should try it. And if you are reading this years after the event, wondering where those old festival streams went — the same steps explain what happened, and where to find the recordings today.
Why the stream won’t open
A live stream inside iTunes depends on three things lining up at once: an iTunes build recent enough to know the stream exists, a signed-in Apple ID to authorize playback, and a broadcast that is actually live at that moment. Break any one of those and iTunes shows a blank page, spins forever, or opens the wrong tab. Apple’s own Apple Support pages for Apple Music note that music streaming features require current software, and MacRumors‘ coverage of the 2016 festival confirmed the concerts aired live on Beats 1 rather than as standalone video pages you could open directly.
How to get the festival stream working
Work through these steps in order — most people get the stream playing by step 3.
- Update iTunes to the latest version. In iTunes, choose Help > Check for Updates on Windows, or open the App Store’s Updates tab on a Mac, and install everything available. Older iTunes builds may not display the live stream tile or the Apple Music tabs at all, so this is the single most common fix.
- Open Beats 1 while the show is live. In iTunes, click the Radio tab at the top of the window and select Beats 1. The festival aired live on Beats 1, so the performance appears inside the Radio stream during the broadcast — there is no separate “festival page” to hunt down in the Store.
- Sign in with your Apple ID. Choose Account > Sign In from the iTunes menu bar and enter your Apple ID credentials. Streaming the live show requires an authenticated session, and a signed-out copy of iTunes is one of the most common reasons the player stays blank.
- Check your connection and restart iTunes. If the stream page stays blank, make sure your internet connection is solid, then quit iTunes completely and reopen it. A fresh launch re-fetches the Radio lineup and clears whatever stuck loading state was blocking the page.
- Missed the broadcast? Look for on-demand recordings. Once a show ends, its live tile disappears from Radio. Search Apple Music for the artist’s name instead — Apple published many festival sets as on-demand recordings you can play anytime.
- On modern macOS, use the Apple Music app. iTunes no longer exists on recent versions of macOS. Open the Apple Music app instead, head to the Radio tab, and look for the Beats 1 stream or the recorded sets in Search.
If it still doesn’t work
If Beats 1 plays normally but the festival set never appears, the broadcast has almost certainly ended — check AppleInsider‘s festival archives for the original schedule, then search Apple Music for the recorded version of the set. If nothing in Radio loads at all, the problem is local: restart your router, then quit and reopen iTunes, and try again. And if you hear a song you love during a set, see our guide on how to automatically identify songs playing nearby on iPhone to name it in seconds.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Apple Music Festival stream still available live?
No. The festival streams were one-time live broadcasts on Beats 1 — the 2016 London run ended years ago. What survives are on-demand recordings of individual sets inside Apple Music, where Apple chose to publish them.
Did I need a paid Apple Music subscription to watch the live stream?
No — the live Beats 1 broadcast was free to anyone running iTunes with an Apple ID signed in. On-demand playback of the recorded sets afterward, however, follows the usual Apple Music subscription rules.
Conclusion
A blank Apple Music Festival page in iTunes was almost always one of three things: outdated software, a missing Apple ID sign-in, or a broadcast that had already ended. Update iTunes, tune to Beats 1 during the show, and sign in — and if you missed it live, the recordings are a search away. For more ways to get the most out of Apple’s audio features, see our guide on how to add and change the iPhone startup sound in iOS.
