A new Apple Music feature called Apple Music Replay lets subscribers take a trip down memory lane with a look back at their favorite music from 2019 so far.
The feature is similar in concept to Spotify’s Wrapped feature — but with an important difference.
Apple Music Replay
Spotify Wrapped is an annual retrospective of your listening habits for the year. It lets you see how many minutes you streamed, check your most-played songs and artists, check out new artists you discovered, and more.
By contrast, Replay can be accessed throughout the year. As TechCrunch, which reported the feature, notes, it’s more of an “ongoing experience” than an annual summary. TC writes that:
“With Apple Music Replay, subscribers will get a playlist of their top songs from 2019, plus playlists for every year you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, retroactively. These can be added to your Apple Music Library, so you can stream them at any time, even when offline.”
Apple updates the Apple Music Replay playlist and associated data each Sunday. That means that it should always reflect your latest listening habits. To use the new feature, go to replay.music.apple.com and hit “Get Your Replay Mix”. Apple will then generate a playlist for subscribers featuring their most played songs of the year. Depending on how long you’ve been an Apple Music subscriber, it will also let you create playlists for your previous years on the service.
As with other Apple Music playlists, these Apple Music Replay playlists can be shared.
Apple vs. Spotify
The introduction of Apple Music Replay is an effort on Apple’s part to challenge Spotify. Apple and Spotify remain the two most popular streaming music services around. Playlists represent one of the ways Spotify has been able to appeal to users. As a result, Apple Music is making efforts to follow suit.
In Spotify’s latest quarterly earnings it revealed that it is growing considerably faster than Apple Music. “We continue to feel very good about our competitive position in the market,” Spotify said. “Relative to Apple, the publicly available data shows that we are adding roughly twice as many subscribers per month as they are. Additionally, we believe that our monthly engagement is roughly 2x as high and our churn is at half the rate.”
