Why wait a year to find out you were into Tay-Tay in a yearly music wrap-up feature? The latest edition to Apple Music lets you peek into your monthly music tally.
It might seem silly, but one of this journalist’s favourite aspects of modern technology is the availability of music services, and their ability to let us listen to whatever we want, when we want it.
Like a virtual smorgasbord of sounds in stereo (and sometimes a little more), you no longer need to fork out big wads of cash to build a collection of music you love or even hate. You’re not spending on CDs aplenty, but can just listen and download, and love your music. And if you love it more, you can buy it on vinyl or support the artist by seeing a gig, or even do both.
The availability of having so much music on tap means we’re not limited to genres, and can experience every style all too easily. And thanks to discovery solutions on music platforms, be it station-based discovery or even an AI DJ that tries to challenge you, musical taste can expand, as well. It’s not quite the replacement for Pandora in Australia, but it’s better than nothing.
At the end of each year, you can even dive into the wrap-up features those services offer to see how your music taste fared over 365 days, or as the case may be for 2024, 366. You can even share those tastes.
But that’s for the entire year. What if you want to see what you did for the past month, or even if a year from now, you were remotely curious what a January looked like for your ever-growing taste profile?
Apple Music may have the answer in a feature subscribers might see near the bottom of their home screens this week, with a “Replay” for the past month.
The addition will see you jump to the web version of Apple Music and launch into how you fared for the past month of sounds, covering artists, songs, albums, and even the number of minutes you spent listening to music.
If you have kids and/or use a music service on a house-wide streaming service such as Sonos, you may want to expect that list to cover a variety of tracks everyone in the house listened to, rather than simply your tastes.
A clever twist on the regular yearly wrap-up, Apple Music’s month in review feels a little like a way to reflect on what you heard, and maybe learn from it, working out whether you maybe should expand on your collection, or just keep on keepin’ on.
