Spotify, the most popular music streaming service, partnered with AccuWeather, the world’s largest, most accurate source of forecasts and weather warnings in the world, to determine how weather affects music listening. The findings? Fingers crossed the sun keeps shining.
Spotify and AccuWeather correlated a year’s worth of weather data to over 85 billion streams on Spotify. Starting today, you can visit Climatune to check out the real-time weather in your city and listen to a corresponding playlist that reflects the mood of the weather pattern in that location.
- 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.
- Rainy days bring lower-energy, sadder-sounding music with more acoustic vs. electronic sounds.
However, it’s all about location, location, location when it comes to weather and listening. Some cities respond strongly to particular weather patterns more than others.
“There is a clear connection between what’s in the skies and what’s on users’ play queues,” said Spotify data researcher, Ian Anderson. “For almost all of the major cities around the world that we studied, sunny days translate to higher streams of happier-sounding music,” said Anderson. “Sunny weather has an even bigger impact in Europe.”