Spotify tests ‘Taste Profile’ feature to let users edit their music recommendations

This Taste Profile feature quietly powers almost everything personalised on the platform: Discover Weekly, ‘Made For You’ mixes, daily mixes, radio stations, and even the year-end Spotify Wrapped. Until now, users only saw the end result — the playlists and recaps — without much control over how those picks were being shaped in the background.

The new tool is starting with Premium users in New Zealand and lives inside the Spotify app. Listeners will be able to see their listening data in one place across music, podcasts and audiobooks, then adjust how that feeds into recommendations. Access is simple: tap your profile picture, scroll down to the Taste Profile section, and use natural language prompts to say what you want more or less of. If you tell Spotify you’re into “more upbeat pop, less sad indie” or “no kids’ songs in recommendations,” the home screen is supposed to shift to reflect that.

Spotify has offered some limited controls before — like excluding individual tracks or certain playlists from influencing your taste — but these were not so direct. For shared accounts and busy households, that wasn’t enough. Babies streaming nursery rhymes, people running sleep playlists, or families sharing a living room speaker often ended up with a confused algorithm. That would show up in Wrapped too. The new Taste Profile is meant to be a cleaner fix. Instead of hunting down specific songs to remove, you can step back and tell Spotify what should and shouldn’t define your taste.

This move nudges Spotify closer to services like YouTube Music and Apple Music, which already let users give thumbs up/down or fine-tune mixes, but usually in small, track-level gestures. Spotify’s approach leans on language and visibility, with one place to see how the algorithm views you, and one place to correct it.

If you’re on Premium and the feature reaches your market, it’s worth diving into Taste Profile at least once, especially if you share your account or rely heavily on Spotify for discovery. A few minutes of cleaning up your profile could mean better playlists all year and a Wrapped that feels more like you. If you’re happy with your recommendations as they are, you can ignore it, but for users on the fence between streaming services, this kind of transparency and control could be a small reason to stick with Spotify.