This one is truly baffling to me. In the end it’s probably “just” a cache mixup, but I still find it impressive. What’s wrong? The track1 is showing incorrect cover art on my iPhone.
On the right you can see the correct cover art, a screenshot of my local iTunes Music library from which I sync music to the phone, because I hate services. I verified that the track in question does include that very cover art (and only that cover art) within the file itself, it’s not just this weird incomprehensible magic album-based cover mapping they introduced a decade ago.
When I saw the incorrect cover art on the phone, I immediately did a double-take. Because I knew that picture quite well – I had hand-picked it years ago for a very, very different purpose. It feels like 20 years ago, but during and after the 2016 US election, I found Seth Meyer’s “A Closer Look” segments to be worth watching. Sadly the YouTube website itself is pure cancer, so I built a custom video podcast for them using youtube-dl and dircaster. For that, I also wanted a pretty picture, so it would show up nicely in my Podcast.app. And that’s where that photo is from. I stole it from the DDG image search results myself, cropped and edited it a bit, and put it on my web server for my podcast client to pick up. You can even see it in action in a previous annoyance!
I most certainly never used it for anything in my Music library. I only added this custom video podcast to the Podcast.app on my phone, and of course that synced the subscription follow back into iTunes Music. And from there it seems to have found a way into my music cover art cache on the phone. As I said, it’s kinda impressive. Sometimes I wonder if they even know that local syncing is still “supported”.