I’m sure that many terrible things can happen within just one year, but for Apple Music users and not only, December is when it gets „the worst”. It’s the time of year, when we all have to see every single person’s Spotify wrapped. It literally takes over the Internet. It takes over Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and sometimes even Facebook.
For users of Apple Music (myself included), it’s like being excluded from the society for some time. We cannot evade, and still we cannot participate. We are compelled to observe. Unhappily for us, Spotify has made Wrapped a cultural masterpiece.
In 2022 its has changed, because Apple has prepared a Spotify Wrapped competitor called Apple Music Replay, which has technically existed since around 2018, but it only used to create a playlist of the 100 most listened to songs of a given year. The stats that you now get from Replay still aren’t as great and „social mediable” as the ones you get from Spotify. Nonetheless you get the basics like top songs, artists or albums. You can obviously live with this little information about the music you’ve been listening to for the past year, but the problem appears when you are trying to share it. Its surely not easy. That is the main reason why Spotify Wrapped is still much better than Replay. What’s more, you still don’t get any summary from Apple. I’m sure most of you have seen Spotify users sharing their top songs, top genres and minutes spent on listening. Apple Music simply doesn’t have that on just one card. You can still do that by tapping through the whole Replay and taking screenshots of each section. Screenshots, because you don’t even have a button with which you can share it. Then another problem emerges, which is that Apple apparently doesn’t want you to share your Replay to anyone, because it is presented in the least „screenshotable” form. Namely, top songs and top artists are shown in long lists of 10 and the most you can fit on one screenshot is 7, which makes it quite evident that you’re not showing the full list.
I absolutely get that those complaints are just small problems of the big world, but Apple Music clearly didn’t make Replay for people to share it with each other and I think that social media sharing is what made Spotify wrapped such a cultural masterpiece. You can fight me about that one, but in my opinion music is definitely a fundamental part of our lives and Spotify wrapped isn’t just about that. It’s a brilliant solution to share parts of our lives, of us. It could be also a new way to get to know people we like. Replay just needs to be better. Apple Music would save so many more users if it could just create a product that actually measures up to Spotify’s wrapped. I’ll be honest, it’s tempting to transfer from Apple Music to Spotify just to share something so coherent, consistent and aesthetically pleasing that is available only once a year.
Sources:
-https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/apple-music-launches-new-replay-experience-reveals-2022s-top-charts/
-https://newsroom.spotify.com/2022-11-30/everything-you-need-to-know-about-2022-wrapped/
And also my own experience as a long-time Apple Music user
I can see the potential of Apple’s Replay, but I don’t see them being better than Spotify anytime soon. As you said, Spotify Wrapped tempts many Apple Music’s users to transfer just for their yearly wrapped update and that may motivate Apple to change something about their own Replay and become better competitors, but foremost, satisfy their listeners first before they lose them. This update may not be huge but it does create quite a stir on social media once a year so perhaps they should pay more attention to it and take it into their advantage.