The Weather Channel’s New Forecast Comes With Elevator Jazz—and the Internet Is Obsessed

It’s not an April Fool’s joke. The Weather Channel has become the latest company to join the wave of nostalgia marketing.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Illustration: Inc; Photo: Weather Channel

Need some dulcet tones to get through the work week? Forget the playlists on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. The best smooth jazz is currently playing on the Weather Channel website.

Earlier this week, the Atlanta-based media company rolled out an old-school update to its site and launched a new way to check the forecast using RetroCastNow. Users still get all the information about their city’s current conditions—temperature, wind speeds, and humidity—but with a low-fi user experience that evokes the feeling of watching a 1980s local news station. Elevator music included.

The vintage interface has resonated with people. Users have screenshooted and shared the throwback weather reports across social media. Many people on Reddit speculated whether this was a ruse for April Fool’s Day, but the Weather Channel put an end to those rumors, posting on X yesterday, “No, this is not a joke.”

This retro weather report is the latest example of nostalgia tech. Overwhelmed by endless scrolls, algorithms, and AI slop, consumers, especially Gen-Z consumers, have been clamoring for a seemingly simpler era of Y2K-era fashion and analog devices. Back Market, a Paris-based company that sells refurbished electronic devices, has built its business on downgrading. The company has blanketed the New York City subways with advertisements for “Yes-stalgia,” a pitch that has helped grow annual revenue by an average of 130 percent, as Back Market told Inc. last year. 

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As the Weather Channel shows, nothing delivers a marketing boost quite like nostalgia, and it is not the only company to figure this out. Earlier this year, Chick-fil-A rolled out retro packaging for its chicken sandwiches and fries as part of the fast food chain’s first-ever year-long marketing campaign. McDonald’s has taken a similar throwback strategy. In January, the company reintroduced Changeables, a line of beloved Happy Meal toys from the late 1980s and early 1990s that have become a constant presence on eBay.

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