Attempting to Migrate Purchases from a Secondary Account to a Primary, but failing.

Has anyone in this forum had any resolution to the issue of attempting to merge two Apple accounts tied to the same individual and failing? Like others, I am attempting to migrate purchases from a secondary account to a primary. I have spent six hours with L2 support and was ultimately told that the accounts could not be merged because there is a music library associated with both accounts (which is, of course, the point of merging them). So it appears that I am stuck with two Apple IDs ad infinitum. Is this what others in this boat have learned and accepted?

I am in this same boat. I spoke with three Apple support folks today, the last one was escalated to a Level-2 person.

The earlier support folks had me delete all music data from both accounts, I backed everything up. No dice.

Then the Level-2 person said that both accounts having Music data is fine as long as you never signed up for iTunes Match. Which I never did bc it was so expensive at the time and then when Apple Music came out it included a lite version of music match.

I also learned during this call that support can try to force the migration and he got the same error. Then looking closely at my accounts he saw that my primary had a Developer flag on it. It turns out that I had used that account to test out Safari Extension Development and that program has long been abandoned and rolled into the full developer account. My full developer account uses my company Apple ID bc Apple insisted that I use it to open an account under my S-Corp.

So the Level-2 tech suggested I reach out on the Developer side to see if they can remove my primary Apple Account from that old non-existent Safari Program. I am now waiting to hear back from them.

I'm writing all this to partly vent, but also partly to get more information out there about edge cases. I also read about folks who had sharing and all that and it just went through with no issues. Maybe the older accounts have flags and permissions that are causing them to fail???

yes, I heard back from them a couple days ago. They said that once an Apple Account agrees to developer terms they cannot remove the developer flag. It can only be deleted as an account which of course I do not want to do as I have had my .Mac address since 2000 when iTools premiered. I also have purchased on that account, so deleting it is a no go. I have heard, that purchasing accounts that are ineligible for merging will now not show the 'merging' option.

I tried to merge again, the other day, but it was same error. This leads me to believe the issue is with my primary account and the dev flag since the option for the purchasing/secondary account still showed up.

At this point, I will accept my fate that I am in the 20% or so that cannot merge. I am hoping they fix it and maybe will just try again every few months.

• primary account in use from 2020 until now

• secondary account from 2012-2020 , so i had subscribed to Apple Music at some point after it released and synced my local library up to it with what was previously known as "iTunes Match" once it became free / included with Apple Music , but since deleted all library and playlists while trying to make this merge process work

spoke with support today , escalated to a second tier support guy after a screenshare with the first tier couldn't provide any answers. on the phone with him i removed all TestFlight apps from my primary (already had removed from my old secondary) Apple Account , tried again , he got the info that my old account is not eligible because it was previously subscribed to Apple Music or has an Apple Music library.

funny because a few weeks back in attempting to beat this i resubscribed to Apple Music and deleted my whole library and all playlists and made sure no files were stored in the cloud from their "Sync Library" feature. but that purchase was more than 15 days ago so i should've been able to merge it by now but nope. simply having subscribed to Apple Music with it in the past (which , of course i did , it's an Apple Account and i listen to music often...) seems to be blocking me from merging it. my current subscription lapses in a couple months (it was a 3 month deal for $10 which was all i was able to reactivate as) and i guess by then i'll either try again and be blocked or they will have updated this to support it.

worst part of the process is my primary Apple Account can't play any of my local music files from my Mac on my iPhone because Sync Library is garbage and switched to my old secondary account when i logged it in to delete my playlists etc.:

"This Device Is Already Associated With an Apple Account: You can use iTunes Match on this device with just one Apple Account every 90 days. This device can be used with a different Apple Account in 64 days."

all this because i purchased some movies on iTunes back in 2012 and i want them on my current Apple Account... thought i'd be able to merge it as expected since i hit all the prereqs but nope. here we are.

I just talked to L2 support, and they told me my secondary account is not eligible because I used it to purchase music and subscribe to Apple Music.

I'm not sure why Apple implemented this feature. I buy music 90% of the time!

Hopefully they are working on removing these restrictions.

I was having the same issue as everyone here and not seeing the "Migrate Purchases" button. I called support and they solved it by having me go into Test Flight and stop testing the apps I was testing. I went into each of the apps in Test Flight (you'll need to click "start testing" again if you had logged out and logged back into your account) and scroll to the bottom of each app and click "Stop testing". Problem solved for me! Apple needs to update their documentation to include this info. At the time of this writing, that key piece is missing.

When I first read that Apple was allowing account purchases to be migrated I just could not believe it. For me as a longtime Apple customer this is 1000 times better than a new AI Intelligence tool.

After receiving the unable to migrate due to account eligibility message I called Apple Support. Spent almost 2 hours on the phone speaking to several different advisors. In the end a senior advisor said the reason for the migration failure was because my secondary account had once in the past been used for an Apple Music subscription.

The migration support document makes no mention of this. Can this actually be correct?

I am at the point where just buying everything again might be best way to end the dual account management. For me the cost would be high (around $2,500).

I have been trying to work through any possible solutions to this with chat support today to migrate purchases with accounts that I have. I encountered the same problem. Ironically, it was in using the workaround of adding my old account to Family Sharing (and sharing my Apple Music account) that is the likely culprit.

Given the fact that it has been reported that Apple Music deletes your user data after a period of time, I am hoping that if I try this process in ~90 days, apple will have removed my Apple Music data from the old account and the migration will work.

it is not currently possible, and deleting all associated music and playlists is not enough

The support document says: "You can’t migrate purchases if both the primary Apple Account and the secondary Apple Account have music library data associated with each of them."

It is indeed very vague and somewhat contradicts the other point: "The secondary Apple Account’s music library data, personalization profile, social profile, and Apple Music Replay in the Apple Music app will migrate to the primary Apple Account. If you don’t have a music library on your secondary Apple Account, then nothing will change."

$2,500 is a lot, and personally I would recommend against it based on principle alone. Of course, you have to draw a line somewhere and if you want to do the migration NOW, it seems that is your only option. My replacement cost would be quite high, quite possibly over $10k or certainly over $6k, so it simply isn't feasible for me.

I assume you spent the 2 hours with a Level 1 or Level 2 support agent, I think it is vital that we reach higher level teams - this can be done via any personal connections, asking a L1/L2 agent to escalate to their supervisor, using apple.com/feedback, etc.

Collectively, if we can raise the awareness of this limitation, we can work to raise the priority of a fix.

I attempted to merge accounts over the last week. An L1 tech said they got an error on their end about my music library, which I then deleted from my second account, but still no dice.

I got elevated to an L2 who said that vague error, "Unable to Migrate Purchases. One or both accounts is not eligible for purchase migration." is a deal breaker. There's nothing they can do about it.

Obviously frustrating, both for the wasted effort and inability to merge accounts.

Just adding to the pile to report a similar experience: was told by Senior support that my Apple Music trial from 2015 was the reason I can’t migrate. It seems unbelievable that this reason will stand as they work out more kinks in this process - especially given the discrepancy in the 2 support articles that has been pointed out.

before i removed TestFlight apps , the option to migrate didn't even appear. after i did , the migration option now shows up but is not functional ("one or more accounts not eligible" error)

i just went through like two hours of various account stuff to clear my old apple music account's synced library , and then deleted all the testflight apps , and i get a vague failure now that one or more of my accounts is not eligible for the migration ... this process is a mess

i think because i signed back up for apple music on the old account that counted as a "purchase" so i need to wait 15 more days to try again and see if it's maybe something else actually now , but wow

Now that the feature has been introduced in germany, I tried to migrate my purchases. Had to quit two TestFlight tests on the secondary account to see the option in the account settings. But then I got the "not eligible" message and ended up here.

I just got off the phone with L2 support who instructed me to delete all songs from my iCloud music library on the secondary account. Created a new user on a mac, signed into Apple Music with the secondary account. All purchases were there, but of course you can't "delete" Songs that you purchased.

So what is it that they mean exactly by "music library data associated with them"?