You Can Now Enjoy a ‘Heavy Rotation’ on Apple Music

Apple has really been upping its music game lately with new personalization options that help you keep on top of your personal hit lists on a more frequent basis.

First, we got a new favorites feature in iOS 17.1, replacing the old “Love” hearts with the ability to star songs and, in turn, automatically add them to a playlist of your favorites and filter your library to show only those tracks.

Name change aside, this was a feature that was conspicuously absent with the old method of marking a song with a heart. This was designed primarily to signal Apple Music’s algorithms to recommend more tracks similar to those you “Love,” but there was no easy way to track those songs down without visiting the Music app on your Mac.

Along with Favorites came Collaborative Apple Music Playlists, letting you not only share your discographies far and wide but let others add their own contributions and offer emoji-based feedback to share what they thought of yours. These playlists could be confined to close friends and family or shared on social media with acquaintances and even complete strangers.

Earlier this month, Apple launched Apple Music Replay for 2024 with a new monthly recap, allowing fans to review the top songs, albums, and artists they’ve listened to every month, not only for this year but a month-by-month breakdown for 2023 as well. Those tracks are also collected in Apple’s standard Replay 2024 playlist, but that’s just a growing collection. Now, Apple is providing a new automatically-curated playlist that will surface new personal hits every day of the week.

For Those Who Just Can’t Get Enough

A new Heavy Rotation playlist has begun appearing in the For You section in Apple Music, offering up a fresh mix of 25 of your fave tracks every day.

The tracks you can’t get enough of lately, all in one place. Updated daily.

To be clear, this doesn’t just include tracks you’ve explicitly marked with a star as your Favorites, although these certainly do factor in. However, Apple’s algorithms are also pulling in songs you’ve recently listened to, and the name “Heavy Rotation” suggests it likely prioritizes those you’ve been listening to a lot lately.

While Apple Music already offers several auto-generated mixes, including the Favorites Mix, Get Up! Mix, Chill Mix, New Music Mix, and Friends Mix, along with your Replay 2024 playlist. However, these are all updated weekly. Heavy Rotation is the first mix that’s on a daily refresh, which means it should evolve more rapidly to follow your listening habits.

Not to be confused with the Favorite Songs playlist, the Favorites Mix follows a similar algorithm to the new Heavy Rotation, except it’s only updated on Tuesdays. This longer timeframe also makes it likely the algorithm will set a higher bar for how often you need to listen to a track before it gets mixed in.

Other playlists, such as the Get Up! Mix and Chill Mix, updated on Monday mornings and Sunday nights, respectively, focus on collecting appropriate mood music to match their themes, primarily using your favorite tracks but sometimes mixing in a few recommendations as well.

Like other mixes, Heavy Rotation can be added to your library as a playlist by opening it from For You and then tapping the plus button in the top-right corner. Once in your library, it can be downloaded, sorted, and shared like any other playlist, although it can’t be turned into a collaborative playlist.