It’s probably not huge news to anyone that weather can affect our mood. However, the folks over at Spotify teamed up with weather-reporting service, Accuweather, to gather and analyze data over the course of a year from November 2015 to November 2016 to better understand how weather affects our mood and our music-listening preferences. Enter Climatune, a website born of this collaboration that synthesizes the results of the data from Spotify and Accuweather’s research project and allows you to see trends in song choice based on location and weather.
In a post on Spotify Insights, the company explained how they conducted the study. After developing five basic weather categories—sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, and snowy (though now, they have added a sixth category: clear night)—Accuweather provided Spotify comprehensive data from the last year of the weather around the world. Spotify took this information and correlated it to users’ preferences when using the streaming service. They also used looked at the music frequently listened to for each weather pattern and analyzed its acoustic traits to determine whether a song sounds “happy” or “sad” based on its sound.
For various locations around the world, Spotify created playlists of songs that users in that area disproportionately listened to during each of the different weather conditions. By bopping over to Climatune’s website, you can see what the other people in your area tended to listen to when it was sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, snowy, or a clear night. You can also compare musical tastes from around the world by checking out what different cities listen to as the weather changes.
All in all, Spotify and Accuweather’s ended up being the biggest research project to date on the connection between weather and music. Climatune is pretty cool to check out, or if you want to nerd out to some good ol’ fashioned bar graphs and the more nitty-gritty aspects of their study, check out a summary of some of their findings here.