Virtually there

If you feel your life needs a background score, you can now compile one in just a few clicks. Here are three websites that will generate live-streaming playlists based on your mood, what you’re doing and how you’re feeling, producing a steady stream of music to reflect who you are.

If you feel your life needs a background score, you can now compile one in just a few clicks. Here are three websites that will generate live-streaming playlists based on your mood, what you’re doing and how you’re feeling, producing a steady stream of music to reflect who you are.

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StereoMood
www.stereomood.com
On the homepage of this easy-to-navigate website is a large ‘tag cloud’ featuring mood and activity-based keywords. Click on your mood or activity — calm, beach party, commuting, etc — and you get a collection of playlists to suit that mood, most of them promoting independent artists and lesser-known cover versions of mainstream songs, sourced from international music blogs.

You can thus choose from playlists for activities such as reading, coding and doing laundry, or mood-based playlists for when you’re feeling nostalgic, optimistic or in need of love.

Sign up for a free account and you can compile your own library of music from the website, share songs with friends and add ‘tags’ or labels to songs for classification under different moods or playlists.

Moodstream
www.moodstream.com
Powered by photo agency Getty Images, MoodStream will play snatches of songs as well as videos and slideshows of photographs to suit a mood you select. Fine-tune your mood settings to denote how happy, calm, serious, nostalgic and warm you are feeling and watch as a slideshow, matched to music, begins. You can also choose to have songs with more vocals, and more black-and-white images.

Musicovery
www.musicovery.com
This website’s homepage has a graph-like interactive element in which the four axes are labelled ‘energetic’, ‘calm’, ‘positive’ and ‘dark’. Map your mood by clicking at a point that best describes your current state and, whether you’re feeling positive and calm or despondent and gray, it will generate a playlist to suit that mood.

Musicovery features several mainstream artists, including One Republic, Norah Jones, Natalie Cole and Death Cab for Cutie. You can also select playlists by genre and decade.