YouTube Music is one of the leading music streaming platforms and comes bundled with a YouTube Premium subscription, making it a smart buy if you use both services. Like Spotify, it works across platforms and devices, including smartphones, tablets, computers, and Chromebooks. In addition, the service provides a seasonal and yearly Recap of your top songs and artists.

Each Recap is individual and based on your preferences and the songs you listened to during that season or year. For nostalgia’s sake, it’s fun to check it out and rediscover your favorite songs of a past season or year. Let’s see how it’s done.

What are YouTube Music Recaps

YouTube Music Recaps are the top songs and artists you listen to during a season and a year. Recaps are specific to your YouTube Music profile and account. They are based on your music listening history on both YouTube Music and YouTube. As Recaps are based on the music you listen to, a few prerequisites are needed for the feature to work properly.

First, you shouldn’t delete your YouTube Music and YouTube watch history, either manually or automatically. Similarly, you need to listen to a sufficient amount of music for Recaps to be compiled, which is at least four hours each season. Lastly, the feature may not work if you mostly listen to music made for kids.

Accessing your YouTube Music Recap

Now that you know what Recaps are, let’s see how you can access them.

1. Open the YouTube Music app on your smartphone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner.
3. Tap Your Recaps.
4. There, you can see your Recap stories and playlists. Stories summarize the top artists, genres, and music you listened to. Playlists are the top 50 songs you listened to during a specific season or year.
5. In addition, if you use Google Photos and YouTube Music, you can see highlights of your favorite songs linked to the pictures and videos you took during the season or year.

Sharing your YouTube Music Recap

Sharing your Recaps is easy, and it’s a fun way to highlight your top songs from the past season. You can either share your Recap stories as a summary of your favorite songs, albums, and genres, which is useful on social media or when messaging someone, or share the full playlist of the season’s top 50 songs.

Sharing your YouTube Music Recap stories and photo cards

YouTube Music lets you download stories as images or share them directly. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the YouTube Music app on your smartphone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner.
3. Tap Your Recaps.

4. Tap Watch Now under the Recap story you want to share or tap the photo card you want to share.
5. Tap the share button at the bottom of the screen.
6. You can then share the image on any app, such as WhatsApp or Instagram.

Sharing your YouTube Music Recap playlists

If you’re not ashamed of the songs you’ve listened to and want to send a full list of your top 50 songs during the season with your friends, you can also do that. Here’s how:

1. Open the YouTube Music app on your smartphone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner.
3. Tap Your Recaps.
4. Scroll down to the Your Recap Playlists section.
5. Tap the playlist you’d like to share.
6. Tap the arrow icon to the right of the play button.

7. Tap Share. This makes the playlist publicly visible to anyone with the link.

Accessing your YouTube Music history

While Recaps are a fun feature, they imply having to wait until the end of a season to review your top 50 songs. However, you may want to access your YouTube Music history to review the songs you played last or the day before. There’s a quick and easy way to do that without waiting an entire season!

1. Open the YouTube Music app on your smartphone.
2. Tap your profile picture in the upper-right corner.
3. Tap History.

4. The songs you listened to are organized by day, making them easy to find and listen to again.

Relive your musical memories

Thanks to Recaps, YouTube Music brings some fun by summarizing your top songs for each season and year, helping you rediscover songs you might have forgotten. To revive memories even more vividly, YouTube Music can link your musical highlights to pictures you saved in Google Photos in shareable photo cards.

However, you may not want your private data saved on the cloud, especially if it’s linked to your pictures. As with any other Google product, you can maintain control over your data and decide whether you want to delete it, review it, or set it to be automatically deleted after a while. The choice is yours and can be adjusted using Google’s My Activity dashboard.

On the other hand, if you’re a Spotify user and want to switch to YouTube Music, check out our step-by-step guide on how to get started with Google’s music streaming service and transfer your favorite music and playlists in a breeze.