Apple Music launches Replay playlist feature

The new Replay feature, which is now available on the Apple Music app across all platforms including the web, will bundle up all the music users have played in 2019, creating a playlist with their top songs, artists and albums of the year.

The feature can also retroactively create a playlist for all the music played in each year that a person was subscribed to Apple Music.

Replay is similar to Spotify’s Wrapped playlist feature, but works better, Apple insists. A user can stream the playlist at any time, even when offline, or share it with friends.

“While Spotify’s Wrapped is more of an annual retrospective, Apple Music Replay will continue to be updated all year long, evolving as your musical tastes and interests do throughout the year,” Apple said. “The playlist and its associated data insights will be updated on Sundays to reflect subscribers’ latest listening activity.”

This is Apple’s first offering of a year-end aggregated playlist, which is something Spotify has done for years with Wrapped.

Replay could also be useful for users in the coming festive season given a recent study suggesting that listening to Christmas music is bad for people’s mental health. UK clinical psychologist Linda Blair believes it causes stress triggers. This is bad for the public, she says, as over the years, the music is being commercially played much earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, Deezer recently compiled a study that analyses how different musical styles affect people’s mental and physical well-being, recommending a balanced daily music diet with a mixture of musical styles to control one’s emotions and improve concentration.