Thanks to GDPR, Apple now offers a way to view and download all of the data it has collected from you over the years. Australian developer Pat Murray has created an incredibly interesting tool that is able to visualize your Apple Music year in review.
Update 12/5/19: Apple Music Replay and Spotify Wrapped are now live for 2019. Read an updated version of this tutorial here.
Update 12/6: Spotify today launched its Spotify Wrapped year in review feature. This allows Spotify users to natively view their streaming statistics for all of 2018. To view your stats, simply head to the Spotify app on your device or to the Spotify website here. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, follow the steps below to access your year in review streaming statistics.
To use Murray’s tool, you first need to head to Apple’s Data and Privacy portal. Here, you’ll want to select “Request a copy of your data.” You can choose to download all of the data Apple has on you, but for the purposes of analyzing Apple Music listening history, you just need the “Apple Media Services information” data.
- Visit Apple’s Privacy portal
- Choose “Request a copy of your data”
- Tick the box next to “Apple Media Services information”
- Select “Continue”
- Select “Complete Request”
Once you’ve submitted your request, Apple will prepare a download and notify you via email once that download is ready. For me, it took around 4 days for Apple to create the download. Once Apple has prepared your download, you’ll receive an email notification. In the email, click “Get your data” and then choose the download option.
The download will come as .zip file. You’ll need to unzip the main download, then unzip the “App Store iTunes Store iBooks Store Apple Music” file.
Next, navigate to the “Apple Music Activity” folder and look for the .csv file named “Apple Music Play Activity.” Now, go to Murray’s Apple Music Analyzer webpage and upload that .csv file. Once you do that, you’ll see a full rundown of all sorts of neat statistics.
Murray’s tool shows your most listened to song on Apple Music since Apple Music launched in 2015, as well as the songs you listened to most each year. You can also see the total amount of time you’ve spent listening to Apple Music, the day you spent the most time playing music, and much more. Privacy is of course a concern here, but Murray promises that no data ever leaves your computer and all computation is done in the browser.
It’d certainly be nice if Apple Music offered an integrated way to view this sort of “Year in Review” data, but unfortunately it does not as of yet. Every year, Spotify rolls out its popular listening history feature, but at least this tool from Murray can help Apple Music members get a similar feature.
Are you going to give this a try? Be sure to report back with your results down in the comments if so – even the embarrassing songs…
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