It’s that time of year again when Spotify users gather under their favorite green app and unwrap data-driven gifts, courtesy of the Wrapped review at the end of the year. I’ve been a Spotify Premium user for several years, but just did the same thing, forcing a smile when the “musical personality” feature called me a “Replayer.”
But this year, I’ve been watching Apple Music users with a little more envy than usual. Not because its equivalent feature, Apple Music Replay, is a huge improvement over Wrapped — in fact, it seems like something of a blatant rip-off when you compare the animations it uses to recap its 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) throughout the year, rather than just at the end of November.
And those are the kinds of insights I’d like to dive into in the Spotify app out of Wrapped season, rather than having to use third-party apps.
Not just for Christmas
There’s no question that Spotify has it, well, packed when it comes to a nice year-end animation of your listening habits.
For starters, the equivalent on Apple Music Replay is strangely only available on the the platform’s website (opens in new tab) instead of in app. In Spotify, it just appears in the “home” section of the app (as long as you’ve updated to the latest version 8.7.78).
Spotify Wrapped animated recap is also more comprehensive than Apple Music Replay. Apple’s is shorter and mainly rounds out your top song, artist, and album of the year, along with your top five genres.
Spotify, meanwhile, explains how many different genres you’ve dived into and what you listen to at certain times of the day (I’m apparently all for “Warm Good Vibes Anxiety” in the afternoon, which is probably my Myers Briggs personality type).
But unusually for Apple, the Music Replay is a little less locked down than Spotify. If you go to the web version (opens in new tab) you can view some (albeit limited) stats at any time, such as plays and hours listened, in addition to your most streamed artists and albums. Your ‘Replay’ playlist, also available in the ‘Listen Now’ tab of the app, is also updated every week with your most listened to songs.
Scroll down the page in your Music Replay animation at the end of the year 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 . While both Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay have their own strengths, both are just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of music data insights that are possible on other services.
Support act
Right now, the only way to get year-round data insights 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 nifty way to get lists of your top songs, artists, and albums over custom time periods, assuming 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 of gold by downloading your historical Spotify account data from the site’s Privacy section and then upload to an app like Stats.fm.
This kind of data opens up the possibility for some pretty fascinating insights, like what you listened to the most in a given year, or how much you actually listen to albums rather than songs. My only real problem is that the kind of music I listen to while I’m working (which Spotify has called “uncannily psychedelic-compassionate”) can skew that data toward concentration-enhancing music, rather than the kind that really do the trick. means the most to me.
It was really Last.fm that pioneered the whole musical data insight way before the Spotify Wrapped concept was apparently created by an internship project in 2019. As one of the first social networks, it took the whole concept to the next level with its “neighbors” feature, which put you in touch with your musical soul mates on the service based on your listening habits.
While that may be a step too far for most, it does show the vast potential of our music listening data. For now, though, I’d be happy to see a Wrapped-style dashboard in Spotify all year round, even though I suspect, like Christmas, its marketing power is all the more potent for its rarity.