Since time immemorial, musicians have derived inspirations from weather and have created hymns depicting rising sun, pouring rainfall, gushing winds and stormy nights. Now Spotify is launching a new service called “Climatune” in partnership with AccuWeather, which will take this tradition to a whole new level. Climatune’s playlist will be in accordance with the weather around you.
This service bears a certain resemblance with a feature launched by Songza (a free music streaming and recommendation platform acquired by Google in 2104) in partnership with the Weather Company (acquired by IBM) which recommended its users the music which was not just based on time, date and location but also on the kind of weather of the area they were present in.
However, Climatune is a little different. It doesn’t recommend anything, but creates a playlist of 30 songs for you, which complement the weather, based on your location which is tracked by a distinct website created by Spotify.
Spotify reveals that they have gone through one year’s weather data and then tallied them with 85 billion streams on Spotify to create perfect and evenly matched playlists for different weather conditions, be it raining, sunny, cloudy, windy and snowy.
The site also presents some interactive wallpapers, however, Spotify doesn’t want you to stay very long on this service. Climatune only has the preview links of the tracks and if one is willing to listen to the complete song, they will have to switch to Spotify. This is an actual master-stroke for grabbing more audience on its platform.
But suppose you are in sultry summer of Thar and are willing to listen to a playlist with songs featuring rain, Climatune offers you that feature as well. You may actually select some other city’s playlist even when being miles away from it.
Spotfy has something to say about the co-relations. It says that the 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.
While the rainy days:
bring lower-energy, sadder-sounding music with more acoustic vs. electronic sounds.
However, exceptions are a part of life. As in this case there are some overlaps in the playlists, which may be because because a certain song complements different weather conditions, or its just a step of popularizing it a little more
Ian Anderson, Spotify’s head data researcher writes:
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. Sunny weather has an even bigger impact in Europe.
