Apple Music Dashboard — an introduction

Photo by blocks on Unsplash

Are you a user of Apple Music ? Do you wish you had an easy way to navigate through your data, and learn about your usage patterns, your favorites, and other insights? Well, I think I found a way for this to happen!

Introducing the Apple Music Dashboard

Edit: there is now a demo available in the tool if you just want to play with some graphs!

First of all, you will need to request your data to Apple:

1. Head to the Data and Privacy page and log in with your Apple account
2. Click on the first link to request a copy of your data
3. Select the first tick box to request the data of the Apple Media Services (you may want to ask for more data, but for the analysis of the Apple Music usage, this is the only set of data we need!)

It may take a few days for Apple to process your request and send you the archive containing your data. Once you receive it, head to the Apple Music Dashboard page.

Landing page of the Apple Music Dashboard

Click on the Load your data button, and select the archive Apple sent you. It will take a few seconds for the data to be processed, and you will be automatically redirected to the graphs page.

Example of the content displayed on the Visualizations page

And voilà!

Important note: all the data processing is performed locally, no data is ever leaving your computer. If you have any doubt, I encourage you to disconnect from the internet after loading the page :)

What you will find on this dashboard

The analysis is performed through three different angles:

• your listening patterns, that include when you listen to music (most active year, month, day of the month, day of the week, hour of the day), how you find the tracks (do you listen to them from your library, Apple suggestions,…), if you skip tracks a lot, which device you usually use the service from

Example of a visualization from the Listening patterns tab

• your favorites, for each year, including a ranking of the top x artists, genres and titles (play with the filters to learn more about them!)

Example of a visualization from the Favorites tab

• a day-by-day analysis, that is actually a heat map of the minutes spent using the service for each day of the year, or for each hour of the days of the week. Here again, play with the filters to spot when you listened to a particular artist, genre, song,….

Example of a visualization from the Calendar view tab

All visualizations are rendered using the Plotly library, and come with a lot of cool features! For example:

• you can download the visualisations as images (png)
• the graphs are interactive, meaning that you can click on items of the legend, or on slices of a sunburst to filter out the data
• you can hover the graphs to display more information about a particular data point

One last word (or two) before you go…

This project was my initiative to implement and is not related with Apple in any way. I am sure there is room for improvements there, so please, don’t hesitate to write to me! Visit the Help page, there is a contact form you can use!

This dashboard is part of a rather long adventure, you can read more about each phase (here and here) and take a look at the source code!

I would be happy to know what you think about this work, please get in touch!