Google beats Spotify Wrapped this year – with YouTube Music Recap available now

YouTube Music has stolen a lead with its 2025 Recap, beating Spotify to the punch in summarising the past year's activity. In what's become a seasonal showdown, apps love to remind users of what they've done across the year – a trend that was started by Spotify Wrapped in 2016.

The viral success of Spotify Wrapped has given rise to many alternatives – YouTube Music Recap (2022) and Apple Music RePlay (2019) being notable – now a trend across many app types. Some services have extended things further, with easy access to the year's stats all the time.

There's a twist for YouTube this year, with the uncomfortable insertion of an AI twist.

That's right, in YouTube Music 2025 Recap you can use AI to "ask about your listening", with suggestions such as "hype my listening using GenZ slang" and "what animal matches my music tastes". This album slaps. The last one was mid, period.

The 2025 Recap can be found through the YouTube Music app, by tapping your profile in the top right corner and then selecting "Your Recap". You'll then be taken through the storyline, but you can skip sections and jump around if you prefer.

There's the option to save your playlist, a calendar view to show you the days you listened to your top artist, as well as nice summary of the whole experience.

Switching to the AI angle, this is designed to be sharable and fun, with the AI chatbot letting you basically do anything you like. According to 9to5Google, this includes requesting things like "describe my listening as a weather report" or to get suggestions of places to visit based on listening habits.

It's all good clean fun, with the sharable aspect where YouTube Music seems to be pinning its hope for a bit of viral social traction.

While YouTube Music 2025 Recap is out there, anticipation is building for Spotify Wrapped, which continues to be a highlight event that gets people most excited. That's perhaps a reflection of the user base, with Spotify reporting 713 million users (including 281 million subscribers) compared to YouTube Music's reported 125 million.

After Spotify Wrapped 2024 gave us an AI-powered playlist and a personalised AI-hosted podcast, fans are eagerly awaiting the 2025 results and to see how Spotify can maintain its cult status.