Apple Music introduces Replay, a playlist of your top songs of the year

Apple Music is taking on Spotify with the launch of a new feature, Apple Music Replay, that will allow subscribers to take a look back at their favorite music from 2019. The feature is similar in some ways to Spotify’s popular year-end review, known as Wrapped, but Apple’s version is more than just an annual summary — it’s an ongoing experience.

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. Like any playlist, your Apple Music Replay can also be shared with others, allowing you to compare top songs with friends, for example, or post to social media.

But while Spotify’s Wrapped is more of an annual retrospective, Apple Music Replay will continue to be updated all year long, evolving as your musical tastes and interests do throughout the year. The playlist and its associated data insights will be updated on Sundays to reflect subscribers’ latest listening activity, says Apple.

That makes the playlist more of a compilation of favorites, which continues to add value throughout the year — not just at the end. And when January rolls around, the 2020 Replay playlist will be a blank slate to fill with your favorites from Apple Music’s catalog of 60 million tracks.

Apple Music Replay is available from the Apple Music app across platforms, including via the web at replay.music.apple.com.

Beyond being fun to use, the addition of Apple Music Replay aims to help Apple better compete against Spotify, which leverages streaming data to create numerous personalized playlists and features for its users and subscribers. Spotify recently reported better-than-expected earnings and said it turned a profit, as it reached 113 million premium subscribers by September’s end. Apple, meanwhile, had 60 million paying subscribers as of late June.