A DIFFERENT WAY TO DISCOVER

Not every day needs the same playlist.

You might want music that echoes your feelings, keeps you company, or gives the moment a different pace. Taranify offers a starting point based on your current mood.

  1. 01

    Choose what draws you in

    Pick the color you’re more drawn to in each pair, at this moment.

  2. 02

    Check in with your mood

    Answer the short follow-up questions about how you’re feeling.

  3. 03

    Spotify playlists

    Explore playlists and open a suggestion on Spotify when you find one you’d like to hear.

GENRE VERSUS MOOD

One describes the music. The other describes you.

Genre is a fact about a recording — its instruments, its lineage, the shelf it would sit on in a shop that still had shelves. That is useful for finding more of something and close to useless for working out what you want at eleven on a Tuesday. Two records filed under the same genre can do entirely opposite things to a room.

The feeds you already have work from a different fact: what you played last. This is reliable and slowly narrowing. Play enough of one thing and the system becomes very good at offering you that thing, which is a comfortable place to get stuck. A mood reading asks about now instead of about the last six months, which is the only way anything new gets in.

WHAT SAD MUSIC IS FOR

Matching is not the same as wallowing.

People reach for music that sounds like how they feel, and this is not the self-defeating move it is sometimes made out to be. A study of the songs people turned to during the pandemic connected lyrical themes with different coping goals, and found that music reflecting a difficult feeling can offer something like recognition — the sense of being accurately described. Tellingly, the musical features on their own showed no consistent relationship. What the songs said was what mattered.

Other times the job is purely practical. Something with enough forward motion to carry the last hour of work, or quiet enough to read underneath.

If you already know what the music has to do, Taranify’s focus music is built for that. It starts from the same mood reading, generates music in your browser that meets you where you are, and then gradually moves it toward what the task needs — focus, sleep, reading, walking or yoga.

ABOUT THE PLAYLISTS

Where the suggestions come from.

Suggestions are public Spotify playlists, opened on Spotify itself. You do not need to connect an account, hand over your listening history, or hold a Premium subscription to see what comes back — playing it is subject to whatever Spotify account you already have.

If you make playlists yourself, you can submit one for consideration. Taranify is independent and not affiliated with Spotify: it has no access to your library and cannot save anything into it.

MUSIC AS A ROOM

A playlist is rarely only for you.

It is also what the kitchen sounds like while dinner gets made, what the car sounds like two hours into a drive, what the flat sounds like on a Sunday with the windows open. The mood the music has to serve is sometimes the room’s rather than yours, and the two can want quite different things.

This is worth knowing when a suggestion lands badly. More often than not the reason is not that the quiz read your mood wrongly, but that it read your mood when the thing that mattered was the situation — people arriving in an hour, work still to finish, somebody asleep down the hall.

Nothing stops you taking it twice with different situations in mind. The colors you reach for while bracing for a party are genuinely not the colors you reach for while hiding from one.

Made a playlist worth sharing?

Submit your Spotify playlist for others to discover.

Submit a playlist
A FEW USEFUL DETAILS

About the Spotify quiz.

Read about the approach
How does the Spotify playlist finder work?

Choose the color you’re drawn to in each pair, then answer the mood questions. Taranify uses those responses to suggest Spotify playlists.

Does Taranify need my Spotify listening history?

No. You do not need to connect your Spotify account or share your listening history to get playlist recommendations.

Can I submit my own Spotify playlist?

Yes. Use the Submit a playlist link to send your playlist for consideration.

Do I need Spotify Premium?

Not for the quiz. Suggestions open on Spotify, and what you can do once you are there — play on demand, skip freely, listen offline — depends on the account you already have.

Why playlists rather than individual songs?

A playlist holds a mood for longer than a single track does, which suits a quiz reading a moment rather than a taste profile. It also leaves room to skip the two songs that do not fit without the whole suggestion collapsing.

Can I use this for focus, studying or sleep?

You can, but Taranify’s focus music is the better fit. It takes the same color quiz, starts with music that matches your current mood, and then eases it over a couple of minutes toward the state the task needs, with dedicated pages for focus, sleep, reading, walking and yoga.

Is the quiz free?

Yes. You can take the quiz and get recommendations without creating a Taranify account.

How should I choose a color?

For each pair, choose the color you feel more drawn to at this moment. Go with your first instinct rather than your usual favorite color or the mood you want to have.

Can I get different recommendations?

Use Regenerate to get more suggestions from the same quiz responses. If your mood has changed, start over and choose your colors again.