As the end of the year rapidly approaches, an end-of-year recap on music streaming sites has become a greatly anticipated event. Almost all of these services provide a yearly review. Still, Apple Music and Spotify are notably the biggest and most used, leading users of the respective applications to be at a constant neck-to-neck. Both recaps offer basically the same thing—a review of each user’s listening habits—but which is objectively better?

Spotify Wrapped has set the standard and trend of summarizing people’s listening since its start in 2016. It usually includes each individual’s top songs, artists, genres, and other stats such as the amount of minutes that you listened, to and the top percent of listeners you are of your top artist. It’s become sort of a cultural thing to share your Spotify Wrapped at the end of every year, posting your results on social media and sharing with your friends, the fun graphics and music that Spotify adds making it even more engaging for people.

After Wrapped came Apple Replay, which has the same concept. Instead of incorporating animations and graphics, Replay is much more information-oriented, presenting organized and straightforward data instead of putting effort into making it entertaining for users. This is preferable for people who want their music listening stats to get straight to the point, with more information than Spotify Wrapped presents. 

If you were to ask me any other year, I would have told you that I prefer Spotify Wrapped with no hesitation. It has almost the same amount of information as Replay, and on top of the stats, it gives you fun and captivating animations to look at, making the experience all the better. But this year, not only were the visuals of Spotify Wrapped lacking, but so was the information. The design of Wrapped noticeably had less efforts put into it this year, and it neglected to tell us any fun listening stats, including top genres. For example, last year it told users what place in the world has the most similar music taste as theirs, but this year it didn’t tell us that, or anything else as interesting for that matter. 

Replay had more information overall, including your top album of the year and top albums of each month, as well as top artists per month. Spotify’s only saving grace this year was the personalized artist messages that Apple Music doesn’t have. Besides that, Apple Replay easily outdid Spotify Wrapped this year.