Apple Music Replay 2023 Now Available

If there is one thing you should know about me, it is that I am constantly listening to music a significant amount of time throughout the day. If you thnk I am joking, we will get to that.

Today Apple began offering Apple Music users a recap of their listening habits for the year through a feature called Apple Music Replay. This is not the first year for this. In fact, last year at about this time was the first time Apple provided Apple Music Replay.

The way that you access your Apple Music Replay is not intuitive at all. In order to see your highlight reel, you may need to go to https://replay.music.apple.com. It may be possible that it will show up within the Apple Music app, but it is was not shown for me.

When you visit the Apple Music Replay site, you will need to log in, but once you log in you will be offered a highlight reel. The highlight reel shows seven different sections. These are:

1. Total Minutes listened
2. Top Artist with the number of minutes listened
3. If you were in the top 100 listeners for any particular artist.
4. Top Song with the number of plays for that song.
5. Top Album, with the number of plays for that album.
6. Top Genre
7. Recap with Top Artist, Top Album, and Top Song.

Along with the Highlight Reel there is a dashboard with a bit more information. The sections expand upon the items in Highlight Reel by providing your top 15 artists, albums, and songs, replete with the total minutes listened, number of plays, and number of plays respectively.

Milestones

One of the new features this year is a new section called "Milestones". Milestones will provide you the dates when you reached certain milestones. As an example, here is what my Milestones looks like.

I think this is a good addition, but more insight would be useful. As an example, I would like to know if there are more milestones, like maybe 1000 artists, or 100,000 minutes. I would presume there are milestones for that, but they are not listed anywhere that I could find. Let us now look at my top items.

My Top Items

I thought I would share my statistics. According to my higlight reel I listened to 85,931 minutes of music. I am presuming that is through yesterday, or 331 days for the year. That averages out to 259.6 minutes per day, or 4.32 hours per day. Compared to last year, this is about 14,000 fewer minutes.

My top artist was Taylor Swift, with 7,410 minutes or 22 minutes per day. This honestly seems low given how much music of hers that I listened to this year. Including listening to the song "You're on your own Kid" many many times on repeat. This compares to last year when I listened to 9,379 minutes, or 28 minutes per day, on average.

My top album was "One Thing at a Time" by Morgan Wallen, this is due to the me listening to my top song "'98 Braves" 125 times, as well as the title track to the album "One Thing at a Time" 103 times.

As mentioned above, it is possible for you to be a top listener for an artist, I fell into the top 100 listeners for a band called "Lucky Boys Confusion". This also happened last year.

Issues

I initally watched the highlight reel on my iPhone, and it did indeed work. However, I wanted to rewatch it on M2 MacBook Pro, so I signed in and guess what, none of the graphics loaded. I tried a private browser, same thing. I do not run any extensions, so that is not the issue. My MacBook Pro is not on any beta software, it is running on the macOS Sonoma 14.1.1. I do not understand why this is a problem, it's just web content, but for some reason it is.

My Thoughts

Overall I think Apple Music Replay is a perfectly fine way of being able to show Apple Music subscribers some of the listening habits. The additino of milestones is good to know, a bit more information about each could be helpful. I cannot think of any additional features that could be added, but having one additional item added every year would be a way of building up the information that is provided.

I honestly cannot recall if the Apple Music Replay will be updated throughout December or not. I hope it does, because otherwise it is missing an entire month worth of listening.