Quick Summary
Apple has started making best-of podcasts for many of its most popular playlists. The best-ofs are available for genre- and location-specific podcasts, while Replay creates a best-of from your listening history.
It's that time of year again: streamers are making their best-of playlists for the year so far. And Apple hasn't just made one best-of. It's made tons: the most popular podcasts of 2024, and then 13 genre-specific podcasts in Apple Music.
You'll find the new charts in the Music app on iPhone, iPad or Mac: open the app and then navigate to the New tab, and you should see the Best of 2024 options.
What playlists are running best of 2024 on Apple Music?
There are tons of them, all accessible from the New tab. There are very specific genres – J-Pop, French Rap, Cantopop, Mandopop and more – as well as geographical best-ofs such as the best of Italian pop, African music and German pop. The more generic options include best-ofs for country music, for A-List Pop and for indie.
There will be more to come: last year Apple also made playlists with themes such as Artist of the Year. And there's also Apple's version of Spotify Unwrapped, Replay'24, which tells me I listened to a lot of SOPHIE and Pet Shop Boys this year. Replay enables you to see what you've listened to each month by artist, song and albums and creates a Replay playlist for you that's updated weekly.
Apple also has another bit of musical news: Shazam, the song recognition service originally launched as a stand-alone text messaging service and now built into Apple's iPhones, iPads and Apple Watch, has recognised its 100 billionth song just 13 years after it hit its first billion.
That's a lot of songs: as Apple says, for one person to Shazam that many songs they'd need to check a new song every single second for 3,168 years. The most Shazammed song ever is Dance Monkey, which has been tagged over 45 million times.
