Does Apple Music Have a Year End Review

It's December 1st, which for Spotify users, ways the annual tradition of the music streaming service'south Spotify Wrapped roundup: customized, flashy infographics of the top songs, playlists, artists, and podcast that yous've listened to over the concluding year, brimming-full of information, mood boards, and simply a sprinkling of judgment.

I, unfortunately, do not apply Spotify. Instead, I pay Apple $x per month for Apple tree Music, Spotify's biggest competitor. And so while well-nigh everyone I know on Twitter and Instagram is spending the entirety of today putting their personal sense of taste in music on blast, I get... a playlist of the songs that I listened to the most this year.

This is fine.

Spotify has been eating Apple's lunch for years now with Wrapped, which has practically become its ain internet holiday each twelvemonth. And yet, it took Apple tree four full years to even launch its bare-bones Replay feature, which debuted in 2019 and hasn't been meaningfully updated since. (I've been using kludged together Smart Playlists on iTunes for years to endeavor to poorly replicate the Spotify experience.)

2021 is no exception, with Spotify offering what feels like its well-nigh lavish recaps yet. My wife (who is a Spotify user) spent the morning time showing off her bespoke playlist to me, which included (amid other things) specially curated songs for specific moods, rankings of where she placed among global Doja Cat listeners, a color-changing "sound aura," and an interactive quiz. All of it is designed to be shared and shown off on other social media platforms.

My wife's far libation Spotify Wrapped recap.

And it's non simply music listeners, either. Artists seem to love Spotify Wrapped, too, with their ain customized recaps showing off how many millions of times their fans streamed their music around the globe.

It's non that Apple tree Music couldn't exercise its ain version of Wrapped; Apple tree certainly has the data, and I discover it extremely hard to believe that the $two.79 trillion company can't notice the space in its budget to task a team of designers and engineers into building a similar tool. Or maybe it could effort to buy Last.fm, which already does a whole bunch of music trends based on customers' listening habits, if information technology wanted to offload some of that work.

And there are enough of reasons for Apple to do exactly that besides my annual dose of social media FOMO: Apple has made no hugger-mugger of its ambitions for recurring service acquirement to serve as a central role of its future going forrad. And yet, instead of jumping on the easy marketing win and massive user goodwill that a more robust replay feature could offer, year after year after twelvemonth, Apple tree simply chooses to exercise the absolute blank minimum.

Ah yes, Spotify Wrapped twenty-four hours, or as I like to recall of it "punishment for being an Apple Music user while everyone else gets to have fun with their music recaps" day.

— Chaim Gartenberg (@cgartenberg) December i, 2021

Expect at it another way: Spotify, every year, manages to get millions of people to spend days posting algorithmically generated Spotify advertisements to every corner of their social media presences, without fifty-fifty offer any free giveaways or incentives. Why wouldn't Apple Music be trying to go a piece of that activeness?

Since I'm an Apple Music user, yous please just imagine my Spotify Wrapped to be whatever artists y'all think cool people heed to

— Monica Chin (@mcsquared96) Dec 1, 2021

Information technology's not fifty-fifty like Apple has to worry almost angering Spotify by shamelessly ripping off 1 of its almost popular features: Spotify already thinks Apple is a "ruthless bully" that monopolizes the App Store to favor its own services and has filed an antitrust complaint in the Eu to that cease. Information technology'southward not like there's a good, healthy corporate relationship to ruin hither. If Instagram could shamelessly copy stories from Snapchat, Apple tin can figure out how to replicate its own version of Wrapped.

In fact, it's increasingly surprising year after year that seemingly no one is copying Spotify's absurdly popular data visualizations. With a few exceptions like Microsoft'southward recent 20th ceremony Xbox retrospective, at that place are still virtually no takers on following Spotify's lead hither. Where's Netflix's flashy look back at the shows you binged over the year, or PlayStation's deep swoop into how many hours y'all spent trying to crush Pride and Joy Paradigm in Final Fantasy Seven Remake? The closest comparison I tin can think of is Goodreads' "Your Year In Books," which also functions more than equally a directly list than the comprehensive experience that Spotify has created here.

But for now, I'thou once again spending December filled with envy as my Spotify-using friends become to show off all their favorite songs, left hoping with increasingly futile optimism that peradventure Apple tree Music volition figure things out side by side.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/1/22812079/apple-music-year-in-review-spotify-wrapped-social-media

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