Spotify is launching a new feature that lets users view and tweak their personal Taste Profile – the AI-driven algorithm behind their music recommendations. Announced by co-CEO Gustav Söderström at SXSW, this beta rollout gives listeners direct control over the data shaping their playlists and suggestions.
The Taste Profile is the backbone of Spotify’s personalized experience. It influences everything from Discover Weekly and Made For You playlists to the yearly Wrapped recap by modeling your unique musical preferences based on how you listen.
The feature will first be available to Premium subscribers in New Zealand. Within the app, users can access a unified view of all their listening history – including music, podcasts, and audiobooks – and then actively edit their profile. They’ll be able to tell Spotify what moods or styles to recommend more or less of, altering their future listening suggestions. Once updated, the home page’s recommendations will shift accordingly.
To find the Taste Profile, users simply tap their profile picture and scroll down. Editing is done through natural language text prompts, making it user-friendly without diving into complex settings.
Spotify has offered some control over recommendations before, like excluding specific songs or playlists from influencing taste analytics. But those tools were limited, and the Taste Profile itself was hidden deep in the interface. Many users complained that the suggestions felt off because their real tastes weren’t accurately captured.
Shared accounts have complicated Spotify’s recommendation accuracy. Families often share a single account on smart speakers or TVs, and teens might connect their phones to a car’s audio system. In these cases, multiple listeners affect the Taste Profile, diluting the personalization for each individual.
Sometimes users listen to music they don’t want factored into their Taste Profile – like sleep sounds, calming nighttime playlists, or children’s songs. They often forget to exclude these tracks or don’t have time to clean up their profiles later. As a result, their Taste Profile can get cluttered with music that doesn’t reflect their real preferences.
This also skews Spotify Wrapped stats, which many users have criticized when their account data is influenced heavily by family members, especially kids. Spotify has faced ongoing requests to offer a fix for this long-standing issue.
Spotify plans to launch the Taste Profile feature in New Zealand within the coming weeks, with gradual rollout to other regions later this year.
Giving users direct editing control over their Taste Profile sets Spotify apart from rivals like Apple Music and YouTube Music, which currently offer limited capability to manage recommendation algorithms transparently. This move signals a growing trend in streaming: letting listeners shape recommendation engines rather than being passive recipients.
Watch for how Spotify handles multiple users sharing one account and whether future updates will include profiles tailored for different household members. How precisely users can tune recommendations beyond simple genre or mood sliders will also be key to how useful this feature becomes worldwide.