Spotify now lets the weather decide your playlists
What type of music does your city listen to when it's a beautiful day outside? How about during a snow storm, or when it's a dreary and rainy day?
Well now Climatune aims to answer that question, because even though you can't control the weather, you get to decide what you listen to in all types of conditions.
Read More: Twenty One Pilots, Panic! At The Disco, more make Spotify’s top artists of 2016 list
Teaming up with AccuWeather, Spotify has undergone an extensive study to help curate playlists specifically tailored to city's listening habits depending on their weather conditions. In one of the largest research efforts ever conducted on the topic, both organizations set out to see if there is, in fact, a relationship between music choices and atmospheric conditions.
Over the course of the year-long study, both groups tracked five different atmosheric patterns (sunny, couldy, rainy, windy, and snowy conditions) from a thousand different weather stations around the world, and coupled those statistics with 85 million anonymous streams that were tracked in those same locations. Researchers then took an extensive look at how the mood and audio attributes of different music changed depending on the weather.
While they were prepared to find little or no correlation between the two, Spotify data researcher Ian Anderson, who analyzed the combined weather and music data set noted, “There is definitely a connection between what’s in the skies and what’s on users’ play queues.”
Read More: Pandora streaming data will now factor into Billboard charts
Spotify used The Echo Nest to determine the acoustic attributes of songs, measuring things like “valence” and energy level to measure how happy a song sounds, and then relateed it back to the correlating weather patterns in the listener's area.
Now on the Climatune website, you can view and listen to playlists from cities around the world and see what people listened to under different scenarios. With data recorded from November 2015 through November 2016, there's even a playlist made up of the disproportionate data collected from the study. On the site, you're able to see your city's weather, detailed information from a city with similar conditions, and how the mood and audio attributes fluctuate in response.
“For almost all of the top cities around the world, sunny days translates to happier-sounding music,” said Anderson. “This also seems to be broken down by location – sunny weather has a bigger impact in Europe.”
You can see even more detailed insights recorded by Spotify and AccuWeather during the study right here, including a number of helpful visuals that help make sense of the data gathered.
Indulge yourself by peering over the assorted playlists at Climatune and see how people's listening habits changed according on the weather. How do your preferences change based on conditions?
Watch More: 10 Essential: ALL TIME LOW songs
