It’s that time of year again when Spotify users gather around their favorite green app and unwrap data-based gifts, thanks to the New Year’s Wrapped Review. Having been a Spotify Premium user for several years, I just did the same, and forced a smile when its “musical personality” feature tagged me a “Replayer”.
But this year I’ve looked over at Apple Music users with a little more envy than usual. Not because its corresponding feature, Apple Music Replay, is a massive improvement on Wrapped – in fact, it seems something of a shameless rip-off when you compare the animations it uses to summarize users’ listening habits over the past year.
However, Apple Music Replay offers something I’d like to see in Spotify Wrapped – it actually gives you access to your listening data (if not the animations) all year, rather than just at the end of November.
And that’s the kind of insight I’d like to dig into the Spotify app outside of Wrapped season, instead of having to use third-party apps.
Not just for Christmas
There’s no doubt that Spotify has it, well, packed when it comes to a fancy year-end animation of your listening habits.
To begin with, the equivalent of Apple Music Replay is strangely only available on the platform’s website (opens in a new tab) instead of in the app. In Spotify it will only appear in the “home” section of the app (as long as you have updated to the latest version 8.7.78).
Spotify Wrapped’s animated summary is also more comprehensive than Apple Music Replay. Apple’s is shorter and essentially rounds up the best song, artist and album of the year, along with your top five genres.
Spotify, meanwhile, explains how many different genres you’ve immersed yourself in and what you listen to at certain times of the day (apparently I’m all about ‘Warm Good Vibes Angst’ in the afternoon, which is probably my Myers Briggs personality type).
But unusually for Apple, Music Replay is slightly less locked down than Spotify. If you go to the online version (opens in a new tab) at any time you can see some (albeit limited) stats like play counts and hours listened to, along with your most streamed artists and albums. The “Replay” playlist, which is also available in the app’s “Listen Now” tab, is also updated every week with the tracks you’ve listened to the most.
Scroll down the page in your year-end Music Replay animation and you’ll also see “top 10” lists for your most played songs, artists and albums, giving you a bit more depth than Spotify’s top five. Still, while both Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay have their own strengths, both really only scratch the surface of the kind of music data insights possible on other services.
Support actions
Right now, the only way to get year-round data insight into your Spotify listening habits is with third-party apps like Stats.fm (iOS, Android), which is currently working on adding Apple Music support.
That app is a pretty handy way to get lists of your top tracks, artists, and albums over custom periods, provided you’re happy to give it some pretty extensive permissions. If you’ve been on Spotify for a while, you can also get some interesting nuggets by downloading your historical Spotify account data from the site’s privacy section and then uploading it to an app like Stats.fm.
This kind of data opens up the potential for some pretty fascinating insights, like what you listened to the most in a given year, or how much you actually listen to albums instead of songs. My only real problem is that the kind of music I listen to while working (which Spotify has labeled as “creepy psychedelic compassionate”) might skew this data towards concentration-enhancing music, rather than the kind that really matter most to me.
It was really Last.fm that pioneered the whole musical data insight, long before the Spotify Wrapped concept was apparently triggered by an internship project in 2019. As one of the early social networks, it took the whole concept to the next level with its “neighbors” feature, which connected you with your musical soulmates on the service based on your listening habits.
While it may be a step too far for most, it shows the extensive capabilities of our music listening data. For now, though, I’d like to see a Wrapped-style dashboard in Spotify year-round, though I suspect its marketing power, just like Christmas, is all the more potent for its rarity.
