Yep, same here. Win8 Pro x64. Using win phone app to transfer music to my Lumia 920 and on the phone there's a lot of albums that just show grey squares where album art should be. I'm sure this will be solved but I wanted to add to this thread to increase visibility.
I admire your optimism but my experience with MS is that they will do whatever they want and we will just learn to live with it.
... if you have manually copied over .m4a (iTunes) files to your phones storage through Explorer (because the Windows Phone App for Desktop is lame), XBOX music will not download the artist image for the live tile or the background.
That's not true. Over time it will eventually find most of the artist backgrounds it has, usually when you play something by that artist. It just requires a little patience.
I'm happy that MS has gone back to an Explorer friendly format after WP7, but for music management on Windows Phone, I must reluctantly admit that I think Zune was much better (so far, let's hope).
I'm not, I hate it with a passion, but it's currently the best option. It is an order of magnitude more difficult and several orders of magnitude less successful than Zune was with WP7.x.
I had the exact same problem, try using Windows media player to sync, this fixed the problems for me
It seems that there is some sort of bug with the windows phone for desktop app. Hope this helps and sorts it for you!
I have so many problems with WMP it's not funny. It doesn't show all my album artwork, although it shows a lot more than X-Box Music does, and it shows things I don't want it to no matter what settings I give it and it ignores the genres I have painstakingly applied in Zune for some artists but not others.
I'm sure MediaMonkey will sort me out but I'll be buggered if I am going to install yet another piece of software to do what I used to have no problems at all with. I love Zune, it is far and away the best music player I have come across and I'm not likely to give it up, ever, unless someone comes out with something better (which seems highly unlikely). Syncing my ZuneHD and phone with Zune was/is effortless but now getting music onto my phone is a freakin' nightmare. MS are the better at "one step forward, two steps back" than anyone else I've come across.