Apple Music kicked off a 10-day event today celebrating its newly-compiled list of the 100 Best Albums of all time. Apple’s press release explains that the list was created by:

Apple Music’s team of experts alongside a select group of artists, including Maren Morris, Pharrell Williams, J Balvin, Charli XCX, Mark Hoppus, Honey Dijon, and Nia Archives, as well as songwriters, producers, and industry professionals.

Apple also clarifies that its 100 Best Albums list is an editorially-created list that isn’t based on streaming statistics.

There are multiple ways to navigate Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list.

Each day, Apple Music is revealing 10 new albums, starting with albums 91-100, which are:

• 91: Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 by George Michael
• 92: Flower Boy by Tyler, The Creator
• 93: A Seat at the Table by Solange
• 94: Untrue by Burial
• 95: Confessions by USHER
• 96: Pure Heroine by Lorde
• 97: Rage Against the Machine by Rage Against the Machine
• 98: ASTROWORLD by Travis Scott
• 99: Hotel California by Eagles
• 100: Body Talk by Robyn

Rachel Newman, Apple Music’s senior director of content and editorial, had this to say about the list:

100 Best brings together all the things that make Apple Music the ultimate service for music lovers — human curation at its peak, an appreciation for the art of storytelling, and unparalleled knowledge of music and an even deeper love for it. We have been working on this for a very long time, and it’s something we are all incredibly proud of and excited to share with the world.

Each album includes editorial content too.

The 100 Best Albums list can be accessed at 100best.music.apple.com. From there, you can listen on the web, add an album to your library, share it, or stream it with the Music app. Each album has its own page including written material that puts the album into context and lists each track, too.

Apple is also celebrating the 100 Best Albums list on Apple Radio and giving the creators of each album an award:

All 100 Best Albums recipients will be given an award comprised of blasted anodized aluminum, sourced entirely from recycled Apple products, in a unique polished PVD gold. The design on the back of the award takes its cues from a vinyl LP record and is inscribed with the artist’s name, the album title, and the album’s year of release.

I’ve enjoyed browsing through the first ten albums in this collection and appreciate that it’s being rolled out in stages, allowing listeners to explore a manageable number of albums each day. This will be a nice treat to look forward to for the next nine days.

This morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise. Apple had quietly added a new Made For You playlist to the Music app called Heavy Rotation that’s updated daily.

As you’d expect from a playlist called Heavy Rotation, mine is comprised of 25 songs, most of which I believe I listened to yesterday and probably other times recently. What’s a little different about Heavy Rotation compared to the other Made For You Playlists is that it’s updated daily, while the other Made For You playlists get updated weekly.

Made For You and Stations for You are excellent complements to Apple’s curated playlists.

If you listen to a lot of albums, you’ll probably have a bunch of songs by a handful of artists in your Heavy Rotation playlist. That is certainly true of The National’s Trouble Will Find Me, an album I listened to yesterday. However, most of the time, I listen to playlists, which will undoubtedly add more variety.

Curiously, the new playlist doesn’t seem to respect the Focus filter that allows you to exclude listening from your Apple Music Listening History. Both Federico and Jonathan use that feature and told me they each found a track in their Heavy Rotation playlist that should have been filtered out.

Heavy Rotation is an excellent addition to Music. Playing it as I write this, it feels like I’m picking up where I left off yesterday as I walked around my neighborhood with my AirPods Pro. I hope that today’s addition of a new Made For You playlist and the recent addition of the Discovery station are signs that Apple plans to explore even more ways to resurface songs in your Music library.

Apple has updated its Replay website with monthly totals for top artists, albums, songs, and milestones, giving Apple Music listeners a reason to visit the site more than once a year. The update bears some similarities to the sort of monthly statistics available from sites like Last.fm, although less detailed.

Here’s what Apple had to say about the new features:

Once logged in [to Apple Music], users can check out their top songs, top albums, top artists, and milestones of the month, every month. They can also listen to their personal top songs chart of the year with their Replay Mix, which updates weekly.

The update extends the existing Replay site’s beautiful, interactive design. Selecting milestones provides additional details about the music you were listening to when you reach each one.

Currently, only January’s statistics are available. The site says February statistics will appear in early March. However, the monthly stats have been added for 2023, too, so you can browse last year’s musical obsessions as you wait for February’s. The deeper year-round statistics are a welcome addition to Replay. I still wish I could access all of this inside the Music app itself, but I love the new level of detail about my listening habits.