4 Great Ways to View Your Apple Music Stats (2023)

Although late to the party, Apple Music users can now analyze their data and listening history to uncover fun insights and re-listen to music that they previously had on repeat. It’s very useful to look over your past listening habits to create great playlists and revisit old songs.

Several third party web apps offer more in-depth analysis and show what a great programmer can accomplish without funding! From visual representation to auto-generated playlists, let’s look at some ways to harness the treasures in your music habits:

1. Apple Replay

Go to website: Apple Replay

Apple Music now offers the Replay feature that will create an auto-generated playlist that allows you to dip back into your listening habits in any given year.

To access it, use your Apple ID to log in to the Apple web player (Replay website) and press the “Get Replay Mix” button on this page. It will analyze your listening habits and compile a playlist of your most frequently played songs in the previous year, or any other year that you have been using their service.

Apple Music Replay also shows the Top Artists of any given year and interesting stats like how many artists and albums you heard in that year.

The recap or yearly roundup playlist can be found in the Listen Now tab listed in the section called “Replay: Top Songs By Year”. It is a compilation of your most listened-to songs. You can access it from the Music app on any iOS or Mac device.

There is one obvious caveat. These data insights – and the ensuing nostalgia – are only available to registered Apple Music users that have a subscription.

2. Pat Murray’s Apple Music Analyzer

Go to website: Apple Music Analyzer

Before apple joined the ‘dip-back party’, Pat Murray, an iOS developer had made an app that gives you a breakdown of your listening habits. His web app analysis is based on your Apple music data that can be downloaded from their server.

The process that follows is fairly simple. Log on to the website and load your data into the app. The analyzer shows you the most played song each year with the number of plays (and the hours it amounts to).

It also displays the total hours, plays, songs, and artists. Other cool stats include the most played artists, how many songs failed to load, and the count of viewed lyrics.

The most frequently played songs or artists are presented in descending order with the number of times or plays per artist. The “reasons why a song finished’ is another cool feature of the web app. Lastly, there is a graphic interpretation of playing time by date and by the hour of the day/week.

3. Apple Music Dashboard

Go to website: Apple Music Dashboard

Alexina Coullandreau created the Apple Music Dashboard project which is one of the most fun ways to visually analyze your habits. It is a free service for Apple Music users and all the graphs can be downloaded.

The core process is similar to the one mentioned above but the results are distinctly visual. To get started, load your Apple Music library (data). It will analyze it and show you interactive visual graphs that are displayed in three main modes: Calendar view, Favorites, and Listening Patterns.

They primarily focus on data related to genre, artists, and song titles with a plethora of modifications that can be applied using the filters. The graphs show more info as you hover over the data points. You can also press on the slices to filter out the section of data.

Some examples are the ability to analyze what day of the week you are most active or which hour(s) of the day you listen to music the most.

You can also check how often you skip tracks or which year saw the most activity. From day-by-day to the overall analysis, their Plotly library visualizations are a treat to decipher and have some great features.

4. Apple Stats on FreeYourMusic

Go to website: FreeYourMusic

FreeYourMusic is a great app that lets you view your Apple Music stats in a similar fashion to Spotify Wrapped. It’s also usable for Spotify, YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, Amazon Music, and other music streaming platforms.

You get a personalized summary of your most streamed music and individually check for your top songs, top artists, and top albums. It’s a great way to look back on the most listened-to music you had on repeat in the past.

You can also filter in different time ranges and generate stats from a particular time you’re interested in. The app is safe to use and protects users and their login info, password, etc. You can log in from your iPhone and iPad, sign in, and see your Apple statistics.

Lastly, you can transfer your music and playlists between all the major streaming platforms within the app. You simply select which playlist from a dedicated streaming app and transfer all the data. Overall, it’s an easy-to-use app and it’s completely free to download!

Why is it worth analyzing your music listening habits?

Analyzing your music listening habits is a great way to revisit some of your favorite tunes, create great playlists from past frequently-played songs, and simply see what you were into.

Revisiting old songs you used to love

It is always a pleasure to re-discover a ‘lost band’ or ‘era favorite’. We don’t always stop liking them, often we just drift away in the waves of overexposure that we are subject to. At other times, we just binge-listen to a track and saturate the joy of it. Returning to it after a break is always a pleasant experience.

Secondly, there is a strong emotional response associated with our favorite songs. Just like a fond memory from childhood, a track from the 90s can completely change your state of mind. You may also find relief from distress by returning to old favorites and revisiting past musical tastes. After all, true comfort lies in what we deem familiar.

Creating great playlists

Studies show that as we grow older, we settle into ‘favorites’ and become less inclined to explore new music. Your listening habits are ‘you-centric’ and go well beyond the general information feeding the trending circuits on streaming platforms.

In simple words, they tell a story, in which YOU are the protagonist. And, minus the phase when you had kids and overdosed on the OST from Frozen, you are bound to find some pearls in the data. Pearls that you can string into a playlist that you know is suited to your taste for sure.

Curiosity and ‘Nerding Out’

These ‘music analyzing features’ on every platform play into the needs of inquisitive people. The whole exercise only takes a few minutes, but it is a fascinating way to data-dive and identify patterns in the way you use a service.

Besides the insights, it is a fascinating way to understand your life and leads to hours of entertainment. In the near future, it will be a thought-provoking moment to review 10 years of music habits and track your movement from Beastie Boys to Norah Jones (or any other deviant course you chart).

Conversely, for better or worse, you might realize that you have been listening to Dire Straits and CCR, forever, which is a good thing.

Conclusion

Data science is transforming our listening experience and the music industry in general. Analytics, more often, serve the marketing department of the companies more than the general users. They are behind the trajectories in trend forecasting and music recommendations.

Eventually, platforms began to provide data-dive opportunities to users. It surfaced as a chance to dip back into your listening habits with services such as Music Year in Review (YouTube), Scrobbling (Last.fm), and Wrapped (Spotify). I’ve rounded up services that provide a great way to deconstruct your past and discover your listening habits using your Apple Music data.