Spotify’s quest to curate the perfect playlist has taken a slightly unexpected turn, after it teamed up with Accuweather to create a new service that lets the weather control what you listen to.
Working alongside the weather forecast whizz kids at Accuweather, Spotify has developed a site called Climatune that provides playlists based on the weather of the location that you are currently situated in.
“There is a clear connection between what’s in the skies and what’s on users’ play queues,” said Spotify data researcher, Ian Anderson, in a post on the company’s blog. “For almost all of the major cities around the world that we studied, sunny days translate to higher streams of happier-sounding music.”
When you visit the Climatune site, it immediately uses your device’s location to provide a playlist based on the real-time weather, which you can choose to play either inside your browser or via the Spotify app itself.
If you don’t like what it spits out, then there is the option to change the weather to one of six options and Climatune will provide a playlist based on that forecast instead.
Spotify and Accuweather analysed a year’s worth of weather data and correlated it with some 85 billion streams to create the site. They found that sunny days bred happier listeners, rainy days brought with them ‘lower-energy, sadder-sounding music’ and snowy days were the time for instrumentals.
The data was broken down by country and showed that, although the UK followed the trend for sadder music in the rain, it bucked the global trend for being happy in the sun by showing a particular penchant for dancing under cloud cover. Given that the UK averages just 1,493 hours of sun per year, we’d all be very bloody grumpy listeners if we were only happy when the sun is out.
You can check out Climatune for yourself here.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
