Apple Music Replay is here, and it's still no Spotify Wrapped

Apple’s year-end review and answer to Spotify Wrapped, Apple Music Replay, has arrived, but it’s still no match for Spotify’s personalized look back at your year in music. The Apple experience — available via a URL at replay.music.apple.com — will show you your top songs, albums, artists, genres, and other information about your listening history in 2023. However, compared with Spotify’s Wrapped, what Apple’s experience misses is the creation of unique, sharable experiences like Spotify’s “Audio Aura” in 2021 or its “Listening Personality” feature in 2022.

These sorts of features appeal to listeners’ sense of self and interest in how they compare to other Spotify listeners. They’re also custom-built for social sharing — for instance, last year’s “Listening Personalities” each were given their own colorful cards that could be posted to a social media app, like Instagram Stories, or messaged to friends. They’re eye-catching, generally fun, and fall in line with cultural trends.

Apple’s year-end review instead relies on more standard metrics. This year, Apple Music users can find out if they’re in the top 100 listeners of their favorite artist or genre and they can review Year-End charts, where they’re met with few surprises. (Taylor Swift is Apple Music’s Artist of the Year, for example.) The chart data highlights the biggest songs of the year across both Apple Music and Shazam, and for the first time, the songs that saw the most traction on Apple Music Sing — the company’s karaoke-like sing-along feature in Apple Music.

Users also receive their own personal top 100 songs chart from every year they’ve qualified with Replay’s playlists. Plus, unlike Wrapped, which is meant to be a more timely look back at a moment in time designed to blow up on social media for a period, Apple Music listeners can access Replay all year long.

To access Replay, users log in at replay.music.apple.com with their ID used for Apple Music. While Apple’s insights are also optimized for sharing on their social channels or through messaging, they’re not as dynamic, artistic or as original as the features Spotify comes up with every year — which differ from year to year as well, leaving users to wonder what’s in store for their next Wrapped.

Still, it’s worth noting that Apple Music’s feature arrived just ahead of Spotify’s — apparently hoping to get the jump on music-related social sharing in 2023.