What you need to know
- Year in Review playlists are appearing for YouTube Music users.
- Like Spotify Wrapped, these playlists show your most-played songs of the year.
- Unlike Spotify Wrapped, this won't tell you how many minutes you spent listening to music this year — which I'm thankful for because that would be a depressingly high number for me.
- This playlist can be added to your library and downloaded, giving you a personal greatest hits list to play in the car while stuck in holiday traffic.
YouTube Music announced a few weeks ago that it would be taking yet another page from Spotify's book by presenting Year in Review playlists to its users to share what users listened to most this year. Unlike Spotify Wrapped, which is still being prepped and won't be ready until December, YouTube Music's Year in Review playlists are already rolling out to users right now.
Mine was waiting for me when I opened the app this morning, stacked with my year's most-listened-to songs in ranked order, with All Time Low's Monsters (feat. blackbear) sitting at the top because that thing got stuck in my head for weeks. Rather than having a hard cap on songs, it appears Year in Review instead cuts at a certain threshold, as I got 86 songs on my list rather than a full, round 100. YouTube videos can appear in this list, too, not just proper album-based songs from the catalog portion YouTube Music, but uploaded songs don't seem to factor in.
The YouTube Music-generated Year in Review playlist isn't automatically added to your library — but it sits front and center in the home tab of the YTM app — and it can be downloaded, which makes it an easy emergency offline playlist to help you get through any network outages or dead zones. Like Spotify's version, you can't edit the order or remove songs if they wound up in there because your kid listened to the Frozen 2 soundtrack a billion times on your Nest Mini.
It also appears that this playlist may shift and grow between now and the end of the year, as I downloaded it this morning and it's already asked to re-sync and update the offline version once already. This would be another bonus over Spotify's static "we only cover Jan 1 to Nov 5" algorithm for Wrapped.
Mix music from subscription catalogs, YouTube remixes/covers, and your uploaded library.
Unlike Spotify, Apple Music, and other competitors, YouTube Music is a streaming platform that gives you easy access to official song audio and videos in one single place. You can also mix it with your uploaded music to give you one library with every kind of music you can imagine.
