Spotify will let you edit your taste profile to control your recommendations

At the SXSW conference on Friday, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Soderström announced a new feature, launched in beta, that will allow listeners for the first time to review and edit their Taste Profile, an algorithmically generated model of their music preferences.

This taste profile is key to Spotify’s recommendations, including personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and an end-of-year review known as Spotify Wrapped, among others.

Starting initially with Premium Listeners in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data in one place in the app, including music, podcasts and audiobooks. Users will then be able to edit this profile and even improve future recommendations by requesting more or less of a particular vibe. After doing this, the app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

To access a taste profile, users click on their profile picture, then scroll down. Changes can be made using natural language prompts.

Spotify has previously offered some tools for removing music from your taste profile before, but they weren’t comprehensive. Instead, users were only able to exclude certain tracks or playlists from their profiles. For this reason, and the largely hidden nature of taste profiling in general, Spotify users have often complained that the app’s recommendations do not reflect their interests.

Today, users often share their Spotify account with others, like family members who access their accounts through a shared smart speaker or smart TV in the living room, for example, or teens who take over CarPlay tasks while driving.

Other times, users may listen to music they don’t want to describe as “their taste,” such as sleep sounds or soothing tracks they play at night, or music to entertain their children. Users don’t always remember which tracks or playlists need to be removed, and they don’t have time to go back and do so. This can lead to the taste profile being cluttered with music that users don’t like.

It’s also dramatically impacted, even ruined, many people’s annual experience with the app — particularly due to children using their parents’ Spotify accounts. For years, Spotify users have been asking for a solution to this problem.

Spotify says the Taste Profile feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks in New Zealand before expanding to other markets.