Jumping on the feature that Spotify pioneered, Apple Music has it’s own year in review feature: Apple Music Replay 2022. I don’t listen to Spotify much, unless I’m making a collaborative playlist. I’d prefer that my enjoyment of digital music benefit the artists more than Spotify does.
Even better, I use local files on Apple Music that I’ve purchased, mostly directly from the artist or Bandcamp, when I’m not listening to the actual physical media. And I still listen to digital music a lot. Unless I’m on a call of some sort, there is always music playing in my office, so this is more reflective of what I listened to that anything Spotify could come up with. It just misses a lot of the vinyl and occasional cassettes and CDs.
So, here is what Apple served up to me to remind me of my listening habits this year. You will see some older music, some of the music that made my top 20, and some just plain weird stuff (if you get to the playlist). All in all, I think it’s a pretty accurate reflection of my digital listening habits.
Note: I promise that this is my final music post about 2022.
My listening habits by the numbers
I’ll let the screen captures from the do a lot of the talking here (I know, I know, not the most accessible approach, but the playlist below should help).
As I said, I listen to a lot of music, some 31,000 minutes worth and rising this year. There’s a good mix of old and new year. The songs themselves are all from this year. I have a playlist set up for just music from this year, and I listened to that about half the time. Given that any wider playlist contains many, many more songs (almost 40k of them), there were bound to be more repeats on that list (right about 2.1k songs).
For those of you that looked at my favorite albums of the year, the top album should come as no surprise.
Those of you that know me well won’t be surprised by any of the top artists. You may be a little surprised that PJ Harvey ranked as high as she did, but I sort of rediscovered her and her music this year. I found the Beach House album to be great background ambiance while I was busy focusing on work. And there is always The Clash. They’d be somewhere approximating that spot pretty much any year I did this.
On the album front, I had no idea I listened to The Clean that much, which is sort of mournful given the news this week.
Apple Music Replay Stats
The inevitable playlist
Taking the lead from Spotify again, Apple provides a way to share the playlist. Apple doesn’t away create new things, but does improve on existing things, see the original iPod. Whether they succeed in this here is another topic for another day (when I put on my day-job hat).
All that said, Apple Music generate the following playlist based on the my listening habits in the application this year–100 songs worth.