How to export your Apple Music play history

Apple Music has no real public listening-history API and no export button. What it does have, because data-protection law requires it, is a privacy portal where you can request a copy of everything Apple holds about your media activity. Buried in that download is a file usually called Apple Music - Play Activity.csv (older exports name it Apple Music Play Activity.csv), and it is the single best record of your Apple Music life: one row per playback event, going back years, including songs you played long before you ever thought about tracking your listening.

This is different from your library. A library export tells you what you saved; the Play Activity file tells you what you actually played, with timestamps and durations. If you want real statistics, top artists by year, listening streaks, and everything else, this is the file you want.

Requesting the export from Apple

1. Go to privacy.apple.com and sign in with the Apple ID you use for Apple Music.
2. Choose Get a copy of your data (under "Manage your data").
3. In the list of data categories, tick Apple Media Services information. You don't need any of the other categories for listening history, and leaving them out keeps the download small.
4. Pick a maximum file size for the download chunks (any option is fine, the media services archive is usually well under 1 GB) and confirm the request.
5. Wait. Apple prepares the archive and emails you when it's ready. In practice this takes anywhere from a day to about a week, though a large or long-standing library can occasionally take a few weeks.
6. When the email arrives, return to privacy.apple.com and download the zip archive.

Finding the right file in the download

The archive unpacks into a nest of folders. The one you want is the Apple Music Activity folder (inside "Apple Media Services information"). It contains several CSVs with similar-sounding names, so it's worth knowing the difference:

• Apple Music - Play Activity.csv, the full per-event play log. This is the file to import.
• Apple Music Play History Daily Tracks.csv, a daily summary. Less detail; skip it.
• Apple Music Library Tracks.csv, your library contents, not your plays. Skip it.

The Play Activity file has columns like Song Name, Event Start Timestamp, Play Duration Milliseconds, Event Type and End Reason Type, Stick recognizes it automatically by its headers, so you don't need to rename or edit anything.

What Stick does with the raw events

A Play Activity CSV is not a list of listens, it's a list of playback events, including scrubs, pauses, resumes and lyric views. Turning that into an honest play count takes some care, and Stick does it for you at import:

• Contiguous playback segments of the same song are grouped into one listen; a session counts once you've listened for 30 seconds (or nearly all of a very short track).
• A skip-then-replay is counted as two listens; a pause-and-resume is not.
• Scrubbing rows are dropped entirely, the "duration" on those rows is how far you jumped, not how long you listened.
• Songs played on Apple Music radio stations are imported and labelled, while station idents and voiceovers are dropped.
• Very old exports (2015–2016) used a slightly different event format; those import fine too.

Keeping it up to date

The export is a snapshot, so your history goes stale the moment you download it. Two ways to handle that: re-request the file every few months and re-import it (Stick skips everything it already has, so a re-import only adds the new plays), or connect Apple Music for live tracking and let Stick record plays as they happen. The two work well together, the live connection is instant but approximate about timing, and each file import silently corrects the live plays' timestamps with Apple's authoritative ones.