It may well be hard to believe that the year is almost over, but if there’s one place you can rely on for a consistent reminder, it’s your music service.
It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means. No, it’s not just the obvious holidays, eating, and gift giving period, but also an end of the year celebrated in nearly every app you subscribe to, notably including your choice of music app.
For many, Spotify Wrapped is on the horizon as a reminder of what subscribers listen to, but it’s not the only one. In fact, this week Apple Music has managed to get in there ahead of its competitor, not only launching a list of the year’s most popular songs, but also doing it on an individual subscriber level, wrapping its own take on subscriber years in a new format, which itself feels a little like what you might get from social networks these days.
Apple Music’s “Replay” rework has launched for 2022, and if you subscribe to Apple Music, it will cover the albums, songs, and playlists you spent the most time listening to, including the number of minutes you indulged in your favourite tracks.
The feature will reportedly keep on changing until the clock strikes a new year over into 2023, so if you get a new favourite you can’t stop listening to in the next month, it may change the outcome of how 2022’s Replay looks in the service, with one feature even allowing you to check whether you’re in the top 100 listeners for an artist or genre.
Depending on what you normally listen to, that may include some of the recent additions to Apple Music, such as the big push for classical music, a bunch of spatially-enhanced DJ mixes, or maybe if you’ve indulged in new headphones and can’t get enough of all the Dolby Atmos tracks on the service.
We found some pretty great tracks to listen to in Atmos, and there’s always the stellar Beatles Atmos renditions, which will probably take up a spot on our own Replay.
As for Spotify, Wrapped is still being worked on for the year, with the 2022 Wrapped Hub largely sitting and waiting. For now, we’ll just stick to using Instafest for Spotify to create a fake music show list of our artists on repeat. Frankly, we wish we had a version for Apple Music, but the fun social experiments almost never come to Apple’s music service, so much like Spotify’s 2022 Wrapped, we guess we’ll just wait for that, too.
