Spotify to offer customised weather playlists

Spotify has teamed with global weather data collector AccuWeather for a new service called Climatune. It creates playlists that detects the location of the user and the weather in that particular location. Climatune then offers a playlist of 30 songs reflecting that weather and the mood it creates.

If a user is staring dismally through the window at rain and want a mood-changer, they can call up another city and get songs about bright sunshine.

According to Spotify, Climatune is the result of a year-long research initiative that compared 85 billion streams on the platform in 900 cities with data from 1,000 weather stations.

The streaming giant claims there is a distinct connection between a city’s weather and the songs that are being streamed.

Spotify Data Researcher Ian Anderson points out, "For almost all of the major cities around the world that we studied, sunny days translate to higher streams of happier-sounding music.”

Snowy weather leads to more instrumental music, whereas rainy days can result in a 121% rise in slower more melancholic acoustic tracks. Cloudy forecasts brings on high energy music.

Climatune merely provides snippets of the appropriate tracks from Spotify’s 30 million-strong catalogue, leading users to track the full-length versions on Spotify.

Thus, the partnership is essentially about increasing user engagement with the platform, which boasts approximately 100 million active users globally.

Songs about the weather include U2’s It’s A Beautiful Day, Ed Sheeran’s Make It Rain, Pink Floyd’s Terminal Frost, The Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again, Crowded House’s Four Seasons in A Day, and Muse’s Butterflies & Hurricanes.

Add to the list The Prodigy’s Thunder, Lindisfarne’s Fog On The Tyne, Michael Franti’s The Sound of Sunshine, The Beatles’ Rain and Here Comes The Sun, Sting’s After The Rain Has Fallen, Soundgarden’s Black Rain, George Ezra’s Did You Hear The Rain and The Vamps’ Hurricane; the list is almost endless, of course.