Spotify partners with AccuWeather to create real time playlists inspired by the elements
Spotify has solidified a partnership with AccuWeather, utilising its real time weather data to learn how wind, rain and shine affects listening tastes across UK cities.
Climatune in action in Glasgow
As a general rule of thumb, Spotify learned that "people typically listen to higher-energy, happy sounding music, while listeners turn to sadder, downbeat tunes when the weather’s bad". Tastes varied by city, both influenced by the weather and other factors.
Over 85 million streams were correlated with weather data, and as a result, each available for cities across the UK in a playlist called Climatune.
Five variables, sun, clouds, rain, wind and snow all affect the composition of the playlist.
Spotify said: "Sunny days typically bring higher-energy, happier-sounding music — songs that feel fast, loud and noisy, with more 'action,' as well as happy, cheerful, euphoric emotions associated with the major mode and other musical factors. Rainy days bring lower-energy, sadder-sounding music with more acoustic vs. electronic sounds. Snowy days bring more instrumental music."
The playlists will vary by city however as the company found that different populations had different musical reactions to weather stimuli.
Ian Anderson, Spotify data researcher, said: “There is a clear connection between what’s in the skies and what’s on users’ play queues. For almost all of the major cities around the world that we studied, sunny days translate to higher streams of happier-sounding music,” said Anderson. “Sunny weather has an even bigger impact in Europe.”