Apple Music on Wednesday released Replay 2025, its year-end listening recap and the company’s broadest view of how subscribers spent their year in audio yet. Beyond the old reliable lists — top songs, albums, and artists you listened to — Replay now weaves in more subtle behavior signals along with new storytelling angles built around how you listen to your music today.
The launch lands in the midst of a yearly race between streaming platforms to share their recaps with listeners at a time when attention and social feeds are ready for music stats. It’s a busy field — but Apple is betting on deeper metrics, cleaner in-app access, and an artist-facing upgrade to differentiate.
What Replay 2025 Shows You About Your Listening Habits
Replay 2025 presents the essentials: your most-played songs, top artists, and standout albums. This year also adds new categories, which include Discovery (artists you discovered for the first time), Loyalty (acts that you listen to every year), and Comebacks (artists who returned to heavy rotation after being absent for a while).
Listeners will also see cumulative stats, showing overall minutes streamed, how many artists you’ve listened to, as well as your favorite genres and longest streak with a single artist. The experience is designed for rapid scanning and social-ready sharing, but it also pays off for those who want to browse more deeply into the ways their habits evolved.
It’s easy to access: the Replay dashboard resides in the Home tab of Apple Music. Along with the annual retrospective, you can go back to each month’s highlights and swipe through past years’ summaries, as well as load up the Replay All Time playlist (Apple’s ongoing tally of what you’ve played most since joining the service).
How It Stacks Up Against Competing Recaps
Apple’s timing places Replay alongside YouTube Music’s 2025 Recap and Amazon Music’s year-end roundup, which arrive earlier in the season than Spotify’s annual deluge. The calculus is easy: get users posting before the feed gets saturated. Market analysts at companies like Sensor Tower and Apptopia have repeatedly observed jumps in downloads and engagement associated with these recap moments, which also function as viral marketing and retention.
Replay’s Discovery and Loyalty sections go beyond simple leaderboards and into the realm of longitudinal listening — a place where Apple’s deep catalog and editorial framing can help it stand out. The Comebacks lens also acknowledges a legitimate trend: catalog music regularly rears its head thanks to cultural moments and social networks. Industry trackers like Luminate have been documenting catalog’s outsized share of overall streaming consumption, with that context becoming more salient to fans as well as artists.
New Tools for Artists and Teams in Apple Music Replay
On the creator side, Apple is growing out metrics available to artists with its artist tools. Artists will also be shown increases in listeners, minutes streamed, as well as the geographic breakdown by countries and cities, and published top lists consisting of listener metrics. That view can help managers figure out whether a single, a tour, or a placement actually moved the needle and where to double down next.
For up-and-comers, the Discovery measure might provide a check on what tracks are breaking through; for established acts, Loyalty would tally core fan staying power. In a streaming-dominated recorded music market — as evidenced by the IFPI’s Global Music Report — these directional signals inform release calendars, marketing spend, and tour routing.
The Music That Defined 2025 (On Apple Music)
This year’s top song on Apple Music was named by the company as APT, from ROSÉ and Bruno Mars. Kendrick Lamar and SZA took second with Luther, while Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars finished third thanks to Die With a Smile. Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us took fourth, with Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather completing the top five.
The list captures a year marked by heavyweight collaborations and blurred genre lines. Bruno Mars shows up twice, a reminder of the enduring allure of star-fueled duets, and the fact that Kendrick Lamar is here illustrates how culturally dominant singles can feed long-term streaming momentum.
How to Get Your Replay and Share Your Highlights
Open Apple Music and navigate to the Home tab; there you’ll find a card for Replay 2025.
From there, swipe through your summaries, save your custom playlists, and snag visuals to share. If you prefer the longer view, scroll back to years past or bring up Replay All Time to listen to the songs that have shaped your listening from Day 1.
With Replay 2025, Apple is not just counting plays — it’s packaging the arc of your listening year in ways that feel good to fans, stoke social conversation, and give artists clearer signals about what actually connects. It is that combination that turns a recap into a ritual.
