The weather has been the inspiration for and subject of plenty of songs. Now the connection between the weather and music can extend to your playlists thanks to a new partnership between Spotify and AccuWeather.
The companies are joining forces to create Climatune, a service that serves up music based on the weather in the user’s area. When a person visits Climatune, it detects where they are located, grabs a real-time weather report from the region, and puts together a 30 song playlist that will fit what’s happening outside the user’s window.
To accomplish the perfect pairing for the weather, Spotify took a year’s worth of weather data from nearly one thousand weather stations across the world. The information, provided by AccuWeather, was narrowed to five different types of weather: sun, clouds, rain, wind, and snow.
Spotify then dug into its own data and looked at 85 billion anonymized, aggregated streams from the same days and locations as the weather events. The two bits of data were correlated to give a better idea of what people were listening during a downpour or on a sunny day.
The streaming service also analyzed the mood and audio attributes of the most played music for each weather type in each city to see how listening habits were affected by the conditions.
The results of the analysis showed that sunny days usually led to high-energy, happy music while rainy days led to playing lower-energy, sadder tracks. Rain also produced more acoustic tracks than electronic.
Spotify also examined the data at a city level to see if there are listening trends in a certain region based on the weather. It found the listening habits of those in New York City and Philadelphia to be most affected by rain.
Seattle and Chicago are more impacted by overcast than rain but Chicagoans were most excited by a good downpour, bucking the trend of most cities that went with mellow music in response to the rain.
Most of the findings from Spotify’s analysis aren’t groundbreaking—it’s fairly intuitive that people would turn to quieter music when it’s raining and more upbeat jams when it’s sunny out—but it’s interesting to see those habits quantified.
“There is definitely a connection between what’s in the skies and what’s on users’ play queues,” Spotify data researcher Ian Anderson said in a statement. If you want to put Spotify in charge of your listening experience based on the weather in your city, give Climatune a spin.
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