We developed Klarafy, a tool to help listeners find classical music that aligns with their personal taste. By focusing on what classical music has in common with their own favourite (modern) music, people felt more confident to set their first steps in the world of classical music. Klarafy recommends classical music you might like, by looking at the music you already love. Our tool translates your music taste into classical music by anticipating what you will like. Choose a Spotify playlist with your favourite songs, no matter what genre, and Klarafy then choses classical music that corresponds and explains why you might like the pieces. The result is a web tool that feels as a technological imitation of a music expert who sifts through your collection and bases his recommendations on the real you.

Please try it yourself on klarafy.com

Just connect to your Spotify account and choose one of your playlists. Then our tool scans your playlist and translates your music taste into classical music. Klarafy searches affinities, similarities or connections based on 3 criteria: the prevailing music genre in your playlist, the overruling mood and specific topics (vocal types, instruments, specific songs, ...) The easy part was tracking your personal musical taste. Therefore, we scanned your Spotify playlist with existing open source technology. The tricky part was to build an engine that matches your music with corresponding classical music. As this wasn't a matter of beats per minutes or algorithms, we took the machine out of the recommendation and replaced it by the human touch. A team of musicologists and music curators worked for months mapping and categorising thousands of pieces of music to gather meaningful musical connections and surprising insights.

The Klarafy banner on Spotify had a click-through rate of 6 times the Spotify benchmark.

3 months after the launch, the amount of Spotify users listening to classical music almost doubled:

an increase of 82,6%. Also, the genre as such increased by 71,8% on Spotify.

Klarafy reached a younger & broader audience. Before the launch, the average Spotify user who listens to classical music was 53yo. Afterwards, the average age dropped by 10 years.

The average Klara listener: around 56yo, and female. The average Klarafy user is 33yo and 61% of them are men.

140.464 website visits and more than 60.000 Klarafied playlists.

€ 580.000 earned media value. Including: international press & social media attention, the national TV news, the major radio stations and our most popular talk show.

Due to the success, Klara is developing an educational tour for schools based on our tool.

Our goal was to give people without any knowledge about classical music a relevant tool to start exploring this rich cultural heritage. We developed a web tool that connects to Spotify to help listeners find classical music that aligns with their personal taste. We choose to focus on Spotify users: they already love music and via Spotify's gigantic database, they could hear the recommend pieces immediately, and share them. By focusing on what classical music has in common with their own favourite music, people felt more confident to set their first steps in the world of classical music.

Our goal: give people without any knowledge about classical music a starting point. Our insight: "we don't know which classical music you might like. But we do know which music you already love." We choose to focus on Spotify users: they already love music and via Spotify's gigantic database, they could hear the recommend pieces immediately. Our banners had a catchy call-to-action "Translate your favorite music into classical music" and achieved a click-through rate 6 times higher than the Spotify benchmark. By using the music people were familiar with, Klarafy lowered the threshold for classical music. Furthermore, we felt the "why" was absolutely crucial. So, every recommended composition came with a clear explanation on the connection to their own music. As opposed to existing recommendation tools (that give you more of the same), Klarafy helps you to break out of the ‘filter bubble’ and lets you discover new music.

Classical music is the ancestor of almost all music we know today: RnB, hip hop, pop, rock, dance, trance, edm ... So it's a pity that many people have lost this connection to this rich, cultural heritage.

Klara, Belgium's classical radio station, wanted to introduce more people to classical music.

But the problem with classical music is: where should you start? Classical music is a generic term for music that exists for more than 10 centuries. A lot of people have no idea how to explore this inexhaustible treasury of the most diverse types of music. They don't know the huge range of classical music genres, performers, composers, ...