Apple has fired the first shot in this year’s personalised-stats season, rolling out Apple Replay 2025 and publishing its global year-end charts days before Spotify Wrapped 2025 is fully live.
The timing turns what started as fun summaries into a clear contest for attention, loyalty and data.
Apple Music switched on Replay on Tuesday as it announced that Rosé and Bruno Mars’ duet APT. is the platform’s No. 1 global song of 2025, ahead of tracks by SZA, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish.
Apple also highlighted Tyler, the Creator as its artist of the year, noting that his album Chromakopia generated about 4.5 billion minutes of listening between November 2024 and October 2025.
What Apple Replay 2025 actually shows you
Replay is Apple’s answer to Spotify’s Wrapped: a personalised recap built from a year of listening data.
This year’s version adds features that go beyond a simple top-songs list. Apple surfaces:
- Discovery – new artists you added to your rotation in 2025
- Loyalty – performers you listen to consistently across the year
- Comebacks – artists who dropped out of your habits and then returned
Subscribers also see total minutes listened, number of artists streamed, their longest “artist streak” and genre breakdowns.
For Apple, these metrics are not just trivia; they encourage people to explore more on-platform playlists, radio stations and editorial hubs, keeping listening – and therefore subscription value – inside Apple Music.
Where Spotify Wrapped 2025 stands
Spotify’s full Wrapped experience is still in the “coming soon” phase, but the company has already primed users to be ready.
Spotify has been dropping teaser videos and urging subscribers to “warm up before Wrapped” by updating their apps so they can see stats as soon as the feature goes live.
Wrapped usually arrives in the first week of December and appears as an in-app story that highlights your top artists, tracks and genres, plus a shareable playlist of your 100 most-played songs.
Past editions have layered on personality tags and listening “auras” to encourage social sharing, turning private data into a public badge of fandom. This year’s launch is expected to follow the same pattern once Spotify flips the switch.
Apple Replay vs Spotify Wrapped: two approaches to the same data
Both companies are working from similar raw material – every stream you’ve logged over the past 11–12 months – but they package it differently:
- Replay is available all year as a rolling dashboard and then refreshed for the big end-of-year push. That fits Apple’s broader strategy of building long-term “loyalty” metrics and nudging you back into its ecosystem whenever you open the Music app.
- Wrapped is a once-a-year event. Spotify leans into countdowns, memes and social virality, driving a massive but concentrated spike in engagement as users post their cards across X, Instagram and TikTok.
In practice, both tools are doing three things at once: rewarding fans with personalised stories, giving artists feedback on how their music performed, and supplying the platforms with fine-grained data about what keeps people listening.
What the “personalised data war” means for listeners
The competition between Apple Replay and Spotify Wrapped matters because it normalises deeper data collection in exchange for entertainment value. Every time you stream a song, skip a track or replay an album, the apps log:
- When and how long you listened
- Which devices and locations you used
- How often you return to specific artists or playlists
That information feeds recommendation algorithms, marketing decisions and – increasingly – public leaderboards such as Apple’s global charts or Spotify’s top-artists lists. Neither product exposes your private identity to other users, but both rely on detailed profiles to generate those “you in 2025” snapshots.
For listeners, the upside is more accurate discovery and genuinely interesting stats. The trade-off is that your habits become part of a broader data asset that shapes what music is promoted, which artists labels push, and how the platforms target future features and offers.
How to enjoy the stats without losing control
If you want the fun of year-end recaps without handing over more data than you’re comfortable with, a few basics help:
- Review privacy settings in the Apple Music and Spotify apps, especially sharing options and any permissions for personalised ads.
- Check connected apps (for example, social networks or third-party tools you’ve linked to your accounts) and disconnect ones you no longer use.
- Use private sessions or offline listening when you don’t want certain plays – like sleep sounds or kids’ playlists – skewing your yearly stats.
The personalised-data rivalry between Apple and Spotify will only intensify as both companies roll more AI-driven features into their music products. For now, the headline is simple: Replay arrived first in 2025, Wrapped is on the way, and your listening history is the prize they’re both fighting to keep.
