YouTube Music is taking a page out of the book of Spotify and other music streaming services by rolling out a 'My Year in Review' playlist for subscribers. Spotify's Wrapped feature has proven popular across social media for showcasing the songs and artists that users have listened to over the past twelve months. YouTube Music seems to want in on the reminiscing playlist action, launching a feature of its own to match.
Now that it's Google's sole music streaming service, following the end of Google Play Music earlier this week, YouTube Music will be tasked with competing against other services like Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music among others. The five-year-old service does have a few tricks up its sleeve, like its handy ability to pull up the corresponding music video to pair with the song that's playing. With a feature as popular as year-end playlists, sometimes a little imitation doesn't hurt.
Although not officially announced by Google or YouTube Music yet, Year in Review playlists have started to roll out. In a section on YouTube Music's home screen titled Songs of the year a personalized year-in-review playlist will be available alongside some Top Songs of 2020 playlists sorted by genre. There's also an overall Top Songs of 2020 playlist with hits like Roddy Rich's The Box and Cardi B's WAP among the chart-toppers for the calendar year.
How 'My Year In Review' & Spotify Wrapped Compare
YouTube Music's My Year in Review playlist is just that - a playlist. That's not necessarily a bad thing; after all, the main goal of these kinds of features is to show all the music that users listened to the most throughout the year. While it's not disclosed how exactly these songs are ranked in the playlist, YouTube Music appears to do it in a very matter-of-fact way. Spotify Wrapped, meanwhile, is more akin to an interactive experience. Available on Spotify's home screen, tapping the tab labeled "See how you listened in 2020" ushers users into a slideshow that details several statistics about how they listened that year, ranging from the number of new artists they discovered to their top genres based on their listening habits. Each part of the Wrapped story is shareable, too, allowing users to display features like their top podcasts of the year on social media and invite discussion among peers.
It may not be a fair comparison, since YouTube Music's year-in-review playlists are still in their infancy while Spotify Wrapped has been an anticipated part of the end of the year for some time now. However, YouTube Music has taken an important step in the right direction by doing what Google Play Music never did: collecting all its users favorite songs for one more listen before the year comes to an end. Maybe YouTube Music will add some more flavor to the feature next year, but in the meantime, it's a start.
Source: YouTube Music