To open your YouTube Music Recap, tap your profile photo in the YouTube Music app and choose Your Recap, then hit Get your Recap. On the main YouTube app, tap the You tab, find the Recap banner, and follow the link through to Music. As of late 2025 you can also pull it up on a computer at youtube.com/recap, which is new. The catch is that a full Recap only exists during its window, usually starting in early December, so the rest of the year you are left checking your listening a different way.

That is the short version. Below is the longer one, including what Recap actually shows, the seasonal versions most people miss, why yours might be blank, and the honest answer to the question everyone eventually asks, which is how to see this stuff in July instead of December.

What YouTube Music Recap is

Recap is YouTube's answer to Spotify Wrapped. It is a personalized, card by card summary of what you listened to, built from your play history and served up as a shareable "story" you swipe through. People constantly search for "youtube music wrapped," but Wrapped is Spotify's name. On YouTube the feature is called Recap, and if you are hung up on the Wrapped comparison we break down the differences in our YouTube Music Wrapped explainer.

The big change in 2025 is that Music Recap stopped being a standalone thing and became part of a much larger YouTube Recap that covers your whole account, not just music. YouTube's own announcement describes it as "a personalized highlight reel of the top channels, deep dives & moments you explored this year," with up to a dozen cards and even a made-up personality type based on how you watch (Sunshiner, Wonder Seeker, and Connector are the common ones). Your music listening is folded in as a section of that bigger recap, with a shortcut out to the YouTube Music app for the deeper dive.

How to open your Recap, step by step

There are a few doors into the same room. Pick whichever app you have open.

In the YouTube Music app (Android or iOS):

  1. Make sure you are signed in to the account you actually listen on.
  2. Tap your profile photo in the top right corner.
  3. Choose Your Recap.
  4. Tap Get your Recap and start swiping through the cards.

In the main YouTube app:

  1. Tap the You tab at the bottom of the screen.
  2. Look for the Recap banner (during the season it usually reads something like "Your 2025 Recap is here") and tap it.
  3. When you reach the music cards, tap Get your Music Recap to jump into YouTube Music for the full listening breakdown.

On desktop: go straight to youtube.com/recap in a browser. This is the part that is genuinely new. For years the honest answer to "can I see Recap on my computer?" was basically no, it was mobile only. That changed with the 2025 rollout, when YouTube confirmed the year-in-review is now "accessible on mobile devices and desktop." If you want to skip straight to the music portion, there is also a direct shortcut: type youtube.com/musicrecap into your address bar, or into Siri Search on iOS and the Home Screen search on Android.

One thing worth knowing before you go hunting: your version needs a minimum amount of listening to exist at all. YouTube says the music section of the main Recap unlocks once you have listened to at least 10 hours of music on the platform for the year, and the standalone seasonal recaps in the Music app have their own thresholds (more on that below). If you barely use YouTube Music, there may simply be nothing to show yet.

What your Recap actually includes

At the core it is the stuff you would expect: your top songs, your top artists, and roughly how much you listened over the year. From there YouTube layers on extras that change year to year. Recent Recaps have included your top genres and podcasts, AI-generated "insights" about your habits, a calendar view showing which days you listened most, and a "musical passport" that maps the countries your favorite artists come from. There is even optional Google Photos integration that pairs your top tracks with pictures from around when you were playing them.

When your Recap is ready, each card has Share and Download buttons so you can post a card to social media or save the image to your phone. That is the whole point of the feature for a lot of people, and it is also why it only feels complete for a few weeks a year.

The seasonal Recaps most people miss

Here is the part that trips folks up. YouTube Music does not only do a once-a-year drop. It has also run seasonal Recaps, including a Winter Recap, that show up a few times through the year rather than only in December. The year-end Recap and the seasonal ones update at different times, and they have different requirements. Per YouTube's help documentation, the end-of-year Recap is built from your listening between January 1 and November 15, while each seasonal Recap needs a minimum of about four hours of listening in that season to generate.

So if you are wondering why your friend has a Recap in, say, spring and you do not, it is probably one of two things: either you did not hit the listening threshold for that season, or that particular seasonal Recap has not rolled out to your account yet. If you want the specifics on timing, we track the schedule in When does YouTube Music Recap come out?.

Why your Recap might not be showing

If you followed the steps and got a blank screen or no banner at all, you are not alone. Recap rolls out in waves by region rather than flipping on for everyone at once. For the 2025 launch, North America got it first on December 2 and the rest of the world followed over that same week. A few common fixes: update the app (older versions do not show Recap), confirm you are signed in to the right Google account, and give it a day or two if you are outside North America.

There are also genuine bugs. When the 2025 Recap landed, tech press aggregated a wave of complaints from the r/YoutubeMusic subreddit, where users reported Recaps that "slide at warp speed" and could not be paused, cards that loaded as blank colored screens, and one person simply asking "anyone else unable to see/access their recap properly?" Others said their supposed top song was something they had "never even heard of," or that a podcast they never touched showed over a thousand minutes of playtime, likely because a device left autoplaying overnight still counts. If your Recap is missing or clearly wrong, our full YouTube Music Recap not showing guide walks through every fix.

How to see your listening stats the rest of the year

This is the honest gap. Recap is a seasonal event, not a live dashboard. Once the window closes, that swipeable story goes away, and YouTube Music does not give you a permanent "top artists this month" page the way some people wish it did. There is no public listening profile either, and no "who viewed your profile," so do not go looking for those.

You have a couple of real options in the meantime. The first is your Recap Mix playlist, which YouTube generates from your Recap and keeps around in your library, so you can at least keep playing your top tracks after the cards disappear. The second, if you want your actual raw history, is Google Takeout. You can export your YouTube and YouTube Music watch and listening history as a file (watch-history.json) and see exactly what you played and when. It is not pretty, and it takes some patience, but it is the only method that reflects true play counts, because the official YouTube API does not expose listening history or play totals. We cover the whole approach in How to see your YouTube Music stats.

It is also worth being clear about what our own tools do and do not do. Our upcoming YouTube Music hub is being built around what the platform actually allows, which means it can surface things like your liked songs, playlists, and likely top artists through the official API, not a fabricated play-count leaderboard, since that data simply is not available without a Takeout export. And if you happen to use Spotify too, you can already see your Spotify listening any time you like with Music Profile Viewer on our homepage. That one is Spotify only for now, so it will not read your YouTube Music account, but it is the closest thing to an always-on version of this if Spotify is part of your rotation.

Waiting on Recap and want your stats sooner? If Spotify is part of your rotation, our free tool shows your listening on demand. Music Profile Viewer pulls your top artists and tracks across every time range, any day of the year.

It uses official read-only sign in and stores nothing. To be clear, it reads Spotify only, so it will not touch your YouTube Music account, but it is the closest thing to an always-on version of a Recap if you listen on Spotify too.

The takeaway: opening your Recap is easy once you know it lives behind your profile photo (or at youtube.com/recap on desktop). Seeing your listening in the quiet months takes a little more effort, but between your Recap Mix and a Takeout export, you are not stuck waiting until December.

Sources and further reading