YouTube Music gets in on year-in-review season with 2022 Recap

It will also be available in the main YouTube app for the first time. Your move, Spotify.

The end of the year is fast approaching, which means it’s time for the world’s biggest music streaming services to summarize your listening habits in the most shareable ways possible. First out of the gate this year is YouTube Music’s 2022 Recap feature, launching today. 

Like last year, the main attraction is the personalized music stats it pulls together, highlighting the artists, songs, music videos, and playlists you’ve most listened to and watched throughout the course of the year. But there are also some new inclusions, including highlights of artists you might have discovered before they blew up and a new “music personality” feature that attempts to analyze your listening habits to deliver a verdict on your “music vibe.” 

Another change for 2022 is that Google will also show these music recaps via the main YouTube app on both iOS and Android. You can find it by searching for “2022 Recap,” which should bring up your personalized playlist and give the option of viewing the slideshow of stats via the app’s stories banner. 

Finally, the recap feature is also integrating with Google Photos this year. If you’d like to share your top tracks from each season, the YouTube Music app will now allow you to illustrate them with images imported from Google’s photo storage service.

As much as recap features like this and Spotify’s Wrapped (which normally launches at the beginning of December) offer a fun retrospective look at your year’s listening, the social media content they generate offers great publicity for the respective streaming services. Even Apple, whose Apple Music Replay feature has historically lagged behind its rivals, has revamped its year-in-review feature for 2022 to offer more stats about its subscribers’ listening habits.