Spotify is giving listeners a long-awaited dial on its recommendations. The company announced a beta feature that lets users review and edit their Taste Profile, the algorithmic model that powers playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mixes, and the annual Spotify Wrapped. The rollout begins with Premium subscribers in New Zealand before expanding to more markets.
For the first time, you can see how Spotify interprets your listening across music, podcasts, and audiobooks and then ask the app for “more” or “less” of certain artists, genres, moods, or vibes. Changes take effect immediately on the Home tab and flow through to Spotify’s personalized sets over time. The feature was introduced by co-CEO Gustav Söderström during a presentation at SXSW, signaling a notable shift toward user agency in one of streaming’s most influential recommendation engines.
Why Editable Taste Profiles Matter for Your Recommendations
Recommendation drift has been a top complaint among heavy streamers. Shared smart speakers, kids commandeering music in the car, sleep-sounds on loop overnight, and one-off party playlists can all pollute a profile. Because Spotify’s Taste Profile was largely invisible and only offered piecemeal ways to exclude tracks or playlists, users often felt their “taste” didn’t reflect who they are.
That frustration shows up most glaringly in Wrapped, where parents find nursery rhymes in their top artists, or lo-fi beats crowd out long-time favorites. With editable Taste Profiles, Spotify is addressing a real-world problem created by always-on, multi-device listening—without asking users to manually clean up months of history.
How the Editable Taste Profile Works Across Formats
Access lives under your account avatar in the app; scroll down to find your Taste Profile, which now aggregates music, podcasts, and audiobooks in one place. From there, you can use natural language prompts—think “less kids’ music,” “more 90s alt-rock,” “dial down true-crime podcasts,” or “boost upbeat electronic at night”—to nudge future recommendations in plain English. Spotify then refreshes your Home feed and gradually retrains its models based on those directives.
This approach goes beyond binary “like” and “dislike” buttons. It’s more akin to setting weights on your listening dimensions, which matters for an ecosystem with vast personalization surfaces: editorially informed Made For You sets, algorithmic mixes, radio, and session-based suggestions tailored to time of day and device type.
A Step Toward Algorithmic Transparency
Editable profiles aren’t just a convenience feature—they’re a transparency move. Policymakers in the European Union, through the Digital Services Act, have pushed for clearer, user-controllable recommender systems. Letting people see and steer the parameters that govern their feeds aligns with those expectations and could reduce confusion over how taste signals are gathered and weighted.
Spotify has long argued that personalization drives discovery at scale. Company filings show the platform has surpassed 600 million monthly active users, with a significant share of listening influenced by personalized surfaces. Giving listeners levers to correct for edge cases—shared devices, ambient audio, or atypical sessions—should improve satisfaction and, in theory, the accuracy of the underlying models.
How It Compares to Rivals in Music and Audio Apps
YouTube Music offers a “Tune your recommendations” control and collapsing toggles for artists and genres, while Apple Music largely leans on Love/Dislike feedback, radio station seeding, and “Suggest Less” signals. Spotify’s new Taste Profile stands out by centralizing cross-format listening (music, podcasts, audiobooks) into one editable model and accepting natural-language adjustments that feel closer to a conversation than a settings panel.
It also complements Spotify’s recent personalization features such as Daylist and the AI-powered DJ, both of which adapt to context. With editable taste, those experiences can start from a cleaner baseline that reflects what users actually want more—or less—of right now.
Expert Tips To Keep Recommendations Sharp
Use the new Taste Profile to explicitly downweight kids’ music, sleep tracks, or novelty listens. For shared households, consider setting up Premium Family and directing younger listeners to the Spotify Kids app, which keeps their activity separate. On smart speakers and TVs, voice match and individual profiles can reduce cross-account contamination. And when you’re exploring genres you don’t want in your long-term mix, switch on a Private Session to avoid logging that activity.
If you’ve previously excluded specific playlists from influencing recommendations, keep those rules in place and layer the new Taste Profile prompts on top. The combination of granular exclusions and high-level adjustments should produce faster, more durable improvements to Discover Weekly and other personalized sets.
Rollout and What to Expect Next From Spotify’s Beta
The beta begins with Premium listeners in New Zealand, a common testbed for feature launches, and will expand to additional markets in the coming weeks. As Spotify gathers feedback, expect refinements in how prompts are interpreted, clearer visibility into which signals are most influential, and potentially new controls for contexts like workouts or sleep.
For a service that helped popularize algorithmic discovery, editable Taste Profiles are a meaningful acknowledgment that taste isn’t static—and that users deserve the steering wheel. If Spotify executes well, your next Discover Weekly should feel a little less like your toddler’s playlist and a lot more like you.
