Raise your hand if Spotify has ever recommended a song that made you think, “Who does this app think I am?” You’re definitely not alone.
Spotify just announced a feature that puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to your music taste profile. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström revealed it on stage at South by Southwest, and honestly, it sounds like something listeners have wanted for years.
Here’s the short version: you’ll soon be able to actually edit how Spotify understands your music taste, instead of just hoping the algorithm figures it out on its own.
Your Spotify Taste Profile Gets a Manual Override
Right now, Spotify’s AI builds your Taste Profile entirely behind the scenes. It watches what you skip, what you replay, what you save, and what you let play all the way through. Then it uses all that data to power recommendations in places like Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, and your year-end Wrapped results.
The problem? The algorithm doesn’t always get it right. Maybe you listened to one Christmas playlist in December and now you’re getting holiday music suggestions in March. Or you played a friend’s workout playlist once and suddenly your whole feed skews toward EDM.
With this new feature, Spotify pulls back the curtain and shows you exactly how it currently understands your taste. Then it lets you change it.
Tell the App What You Actually Want
The customization here is refreshingly simple. Want more Justin Bieber in your recommendations? Ask for more. Want house music to disappear from your Daily Mixes forever? Ask for less.
You can also steer things in more specific directions. Tell the app you’re in the mood for a certain genre, a particular artist, or even just a general vibe you’re going for. Over time, your inputs shape what Spotify prioritizes on your homepage.
So instead of the algorithm guessing what you want based on a single late-night listening session, you’re actively co-authoring your own music discovery experience.
When Can You Try It?
There’s a small catch. The feature is currently in beta, and Spotify plans to roll it out first to listeners in New Zealand over the coming weeks. No hard launch date has been confirmed for other regions yet.
Still, a New Zealand launch usually signals a broader rollout isn’t far behind. It’s a classic Spotify move: test in a smaller market, iron out the kinks, then expand globally.
A Smart Step for AI-Driven Music Discovery
This feels like a genuinely useful update rather than just a flashy feature announcement. Algorithmic recommendations are only as good as the data feeding them, and giving users a way to correct or guide that data makes a lot of sense.
Think of it like training a new friend on your music taste. The algorithm has been making educated guesses based on what it sees, but now you can actually talk back to it.
For anyone who’s ever felt like Spotify was stuck in a rut with your recommendations, or pushing you toward music that doesn’t quite fit, this kind of transparent personalization is a welcome change.
Whether it works as well in practice as it sounds in theory, we’ll have to wait and see. But the direction is right.
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