Apple Music did a better Spotify Wrapped than Spotify for two reasons

Zac Hall | Dec 5 2024 - 6:10 am PT

The narrative for years has been that Spotify Wrapped, a look back at your music listening habits for the year, has left Apple Music members longing for a matching experience. Apple Music, of course, has been developing its Replay feature for nearly as long. Still, Spotify Wrapped has made vocal Apple Music subscribers jealous each December.

This year, however, a tide shift seems to have occurred for two reasons.

Best Replay yet

First, Apple Music Replay for 2024 is the best version yet.

Apple finally addressed the biggest complaint about its version of Wrapped: it takes you out of the Music app and onto the web where signing in is required. That’s still true in some instances (the Mac and Vision Pro for example), but the Music app on iPhone and iPad presents the full Replay experience without leaving the app.

Replay is also just really good this year. Insights like being in the top 100 or 1000 listeners for an artist or total listening minutes per artist and song make it a data-driven and fascinating look at your listening habits. Apple has also designed Replay to be especially shareable with an Instagram Stories-like presentation and sharable images and a short video for posting on social.

Apple also has Replay playlists that update as the year progresses, but the full Replay recap is where the magic exists.

AI Wrapped slop?

Meanwhile, over in Spotify world, the originators of the idea are taking a lot of negative feedback from disappointed users this year. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch has dutifully collected a sample of the underwhelmed and disappointed.

Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative data stories that it typically offers — like those that identify your music personality, match you to a town that shares your musical tastes, describe your “audio aura,” or turn your listening history into a game you can share with friends, among other things. Others are upset over the lack of more detailed stats and the exclusion of information they’ve come to expect, like top music genres and top podcasts. Spotify declined to clarify how they decided which features to include.

On X, a number of people are sharing their feedback alongside the #SpotifyWrapped2024 hashtag, where they’re describing this year’s annual review of their listening history as “boring,” a “flop,” “underwhelming,” a “disappointment,” and more. Although this hasn’t stopped people from sharing screenshots of their Wrapped, a scroll through the hashtag currently surfaces more complaints than accolades.

The AI podcast, powered by Google’s Notebook LM tool, is a clever way to introduce the tool to Spotify users. I’ve personally enjoyed experimenting with Notebook LM and found the AI-powered podcast it creates to be impressive. Still, it seems to have struck a chord among Spotify listeners in a bad way.

What do you think? Have you noticed Apple Music Replay getting better or Spotify Wrapped getting worse? For me, I’ve been an Apple Music member since it was called Beats Music. Spotify’s UX has just never been appealing to me. But we’re curious on your thoughts. Has Apple exceeded where Spotify has backtracked?

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