While Apple Music Replay fails to live up to Spotify Wrapped, YouTube Music’s 2023 Recap offers a personalized and interactive experience. YouTube Music introduced three new features this year — custom album art, music moods and the ability to personalize and shuffle Google Photos with favorite songs. And, for the first time, you can see your stats in the YouTube Music app, whereas Apple Music’s year-end review is only available on the web.
To access YouTube Music’s Recap, select your profile avatar in the top-right corner and tap on “Your Recap.” YouTube Music shows your top five artists, songs, moods, genres, albums and playlists as well as your longest listening streak and how many total minutes you listened to in 2023.
Image Credits: YouTube Music
New to the Recap experience is custom album art, where YouTube Music takes a collection of colors and visuals from your top songs to create an album cover that captures your vibe and aesthetic for the entire year. The music service also introduced mood matching, a new feature that associates your top songs with terms like laid back, happy-go-plucky and stoked.
Last year, YouTube Music launched shareable cards that you could personalize by adding your own images directly from Google Photos. Now, it’s giving you the ability to shuffle and customize the photos, combining your favorite songs from each season with nostalgic memories to create a visual that wraps up the entire year in a neat little bow.
Although it’s hard to compete with Spotify Wrapped — with its nine years of content and hilarious memes — YouTube Music has the right idea. Meanwhile, Apple Music lacks flavor with its boring metrics and muted color schemes.
