Apple Music Replay Numbly Delivers Numbers Again
I apologize if the person running Apple Music Replay cares deeply about it, and is under resourced by someone above them who doesn’t care. Somewhere in that organization is a person, or group of people, who sees having Apple Music Replay as a feature to check off on a list, and they feel like they checked the box again for 2024. That’s mostly evident from the lack of progress from last year, which lacked progress from the year before, which was a sluggish and inadequate response to Spotify Unwrapped.
This year I was surprised to see that Apple Music on iOS didn’t send me to a web browser to authenticate for access to participate in what is essentially a marketing exercise. But of course it’s a web view that’s loaded within the Music app complete with a “close” button that I keep accidentally mashing when I meant to navigate back.
Obviously, this made me deeply suspicious of the macOS Music app experience. Sure enough, on my Sonoma MacBook Pro it’s the same experience as before. Nothing says “fun you personally identify with” like biometric authorization in a Safari window and agreeing to Music information collection policies in a web 2.0 modal in the browser.
Why even make a Music app for the Mac at this point? Just send me to Safari when you want me to use your music subscription service so I can live the dream year-round.
Who needs to develop native apps for Apple’s platforms at all? Apple says the web is the way to go.
Of course, I later found out that it’s only iOS and iPadOS 18.1 users that get to experience the glory of the embedded web view, and that anyone with an older OS gets the ol’ biometric browser how-do-you-do.
Perhaps there’s some account authorization permission enabled by 18.1 that let’s this “magic” modal work, but this is the third year of Replay and this is the best that could be done? Upgrade to the latest and greatest OS so you can see numbers and text in an app?
Reel Fun
As for the experience, there is still this weird unspoken agreement that Apple will present subscribers with vertical videos in the style of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, along with a share button so the vertical videos can be downloaded individually and then presumably uploaded to those social networks.
Some using Replay might be wondering why you can’t just download all seven at once, but it seems like that’s because they’re canvas elements? I guess? Apple seems to be rendering each one to a video when you ask to save it. This also explains some of the stuttering and performance issues I was infrequently experiencing on my computer and my brand new iPhone 16 Pro. There is no central server where you’re streaming these moving pictures from.
I bet someone thought that was really clever, except that if the goal is to download and share the videos then it shouldn’t require this level of effort or use this much of a person’s time.
Most importantly, the music element that Apple added to each highlight reel is not saved with the video. Presumably this is because of licensing rights. This might also explain why they’re canvas elements because then they can stream the music separately?
I don’t know why things are the way they are, but I do know that if you’re going to play the music, and pretend like you can save a video to upload it to the social media apps you’re trying to ape that they expect the excerpt of the music to go along for the ride. Otherwise people are watching silent, flying text and album artwork.
It’s just as exciting as a PowerPoint slide deck from someone who forgot to unmute themselves on Zoom. What energy and dynamism this music service has.
Of course, the desktop version still doesn’t have video sharing controls to render these videos. You can watch the vertical videos in a very tiny region of your monitor, but there are no desktop playback controls or download buttons. Hilariously, there are playback control icon images included with the page assets if you inspect the page, even though they are unused.
If the excuse for failing to provide video export is that you’re not supposed to upload to social media from a filthy computer, then show us graphics and video formatted for a filthy computer.
A bizarre bonus of the bad desktop browser experience is that you can tap on the artists and songs from the lists Replay provides and it takes you to that artist or song, but unfortunately it’s in the Safari version of Apple Music. If only Apple had some kind of linking URL scheme they could use to open these links in their apps. What a fantastical invention such a thing would be.
This is still somehow better than the iOS experience where tapping furiously on a song or artist on the same list in the web view embedded inside of the iOS Apple Music app doesn’t do a damn thing. It doesn’t open it in the web view, and it doesn’t open it in the app. You’re essentially looking at a list with large fonts and circle boolean artwork that can’t functionally do anything.
The only functional link is the one that takes you to your Replay ‘24 playlist.
You can’t share this information within Apple Music on your profile. God knows why we even have them at this point. Someone who knows how to get to my profile can in theory see who I’m listening to but the social graph seems to largely only be used to generate nonsensical friends playlists to torture my ears with.
Numb to Numbers
The real sin, beyond all the interface and interaction mishegoss, is that the actual thing all this is trying to communicate is terribly boring. The very first whizz-bang slide is:
You listened to 3,464 minutes of music.
WOW! Let me download this silent video and upload it to Instagram POST HASTE!
Out of 282 artists one stood out. Top Artist Tycho 550 Minutes
I can’t believe I didn’t make it to 283 artists. For shame. At least I didn’t embarrass myself with 549 minutes of Tycho.
What really got me was:
You played 602 songs, one was your anthem. Top Song Good Luck, Babe Chappell Roan 8 Plays First Play: April 8
Uh, eight plays seems way lower than my recollection, and also way lower than anything that deserves to be called my anthem. At least I know I first played it on April 8th. I’ll note that special day on my calendar.
The Highlight Reel just goes on and on like this. Database queries with utterly generic text set to extremely corporate graphics. String replacement is great and all, but it doesn’t hide the fact that this thing just spits out numbers every year and it goes into a sentence in such a mindless way.
Replay isn’t just the Highlights Reel, it also has ordered lists of albums, artists, and songs that can each be saved as a PNG. However, it seems no one checked what happens when the names for things are longer than the space Apple chose to allocate so the very special things the lists commemorate get cut off with an ellipsis. How long have we been formatting text, folks? Shouldn’t we be better at this?
Scroll further down in Replay and you get your Milestones. Just like last year, they seem to mean nothing. It’s like a fitness goal, or airline status qualification, but it’s just a circle with a number in it and a date you reached the milestone. What are the milestones, and why would anyone, especially me, care about it? Am I working towards something? Am I competing against someone else? What does this commemorate other than “number big on day”?
Well, if you tap on “See All Milestones” you get a screen that has no share button, so take a screenshot of it, and it shows that I am “In Progress” to hit “5,000” minutes listened, “1,000” songs played, and “500” artists played. These are seemingly just arbitrary numbers based on doubling the numbers in the circles that it says that I have reached. So … this is just arbitrary filler and doesn’t offer any insights.
From my post about last year’s Replay:
This whole thing feels like someone was very excited to animate things, move album artwork around, and transform data, but no one really gave much thought to what this whole thing is supposed to mean to someone. How it makes someone feel.
I still don’t feel anything this year. The musical backing to the highlight reels gives the illusion of feeling something, because I feel something about that fragment of music while it plays, but not about the statistics on display. It’s very easy to double check that by rendering out the video without that music and see that it really is just a PowerPoint on mute. It’ll be the same thing next year, and the year after that, but with different numbers, gradients, and milestones.
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