Apple Music Will Finally Show You “All-Time” Stats, but I Have a Better Option
It’s been 10 years since the launch of Apple Music, and Apple is celebrating in a number of ways : with a new studio in Los Angeles, special programming on Apple Music Radio (including a countdown of the 500 most-listened-to songs on Apple Music), and a new Replay All Time playlist that gives you your overall listening stats since you first signed up.
Replay All Time is based on the annual review of your listening habits that Apple Music publishes toward the end of each year. These annual reviews are available on all major music streaming services and have proven popular—a fun way to look back on changing tastes and forgotten favorites. And now you’re not limited to just one year.
If you’re interested in long-term listening statistics, there’s already a better app for the job, one that I’ve been using for much longer than Apple Music. It works across multiple platforms and services, and has been around for over 20 years.
How to find the Replay All Time playlist
The Replay All Time playlist is available wherever you find Apple Music. Open Apple Music on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, or the web , and you’ll see Replay All Time prominently displayed in the Home tab, alongside the usual selection of algorithmically generated playlists.
Select a playlist and it’ll open just like any other: you’ll have Play and Shuffle buttons, and if you tap the three dots next to the tracks, you can save it permanently to your library, add it to an existing playlist or your current queue, mark all tracks as favorites, and share the playlist with other people.
This sharing ability is part of the appeal of these playlists — you can let the world know how loyal you’ve been to your favorite artists over the years, or how much your tastes have changed. You can share a link to a playlist across multiple apps, and even embed it on the web.
Add a playlist to your library (via the three-dot menu), and you can view stats for those tracks in the Apple Music desktop app: With the playlist open onscreen, choose View > As Songs to show more columns, then View > Show View Options to choose the stats (such as Plays and Last Played) you want to display.
How to Use Last.fm to Track Your Listening
If you like digging into your listening stats, there’s another service worth knowing about that’s been around a lot longer than Apple Music: Last.fm. It tracks every song you listen to (a process the app calls “scrobbling”), and can then break down your stats by year, month, week, or day.
Part of Last.fm’s appeal is that it has apps and extensions available for multiple streaming services, both mobile and desktop, which is handy if you have multiple streaming music subscriptions or if you switch between them. From YouTube videos on the web to a Spotify playlist on your phone, everything is logged.
I’ve been using Last.fm for so long that I can go back in time and rediscover songs I’d forgotten about: if I want, I can look up exactly which album was my favourite in March 2010 (it was Wait for Me by Moby). Last.fm is also great at recommending new music, not least because it has so much listening data to analyse.
You can sign up for Last.fm for free and start scrobbling using a wide range of official and unofficial tools designed for the job. For $5 a month or $50 a year, you can also sign up for Last.fm Pro, which gives you even more insight into your listening history and even more analysis options (like comparing your tastes to other Last.fm users).