Spotify lets you control recommendations by editing your preferred profile

At Friday’s SXSW conference, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström announced in beta a new feature that will allow listeners to see and edit their Taste Profile, an algorithmically generated model of their music tastes, for the first time.

This taste profile is the key to Spotify’s recommendations, including Discover Weekly, personalized playlists like Made For You picks, and year-end reviews known as Spotify Wrapped.

Starting initially with Premium listeners in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data, including music, podcasts and audiobooks, in one place within the app. Users will be able to edit this profile and fine-tune future recommendations by asking for more or less specific vibes. Once you do this, your app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

To access a Taste profile, users tap their profile picture and scroll down. Changes can be made using natural language prompts.

Spotify previously offered some tools to remove music from your taste profile, but they weren’t as comprehensive. Instead, users could only exclude specific tracks or playlists from their profiles. Because of this, and the largely hidden nature of overall taste profiles, Spotify users often complained that the app’s recommendations did not reflect their interests.

Nowadays, users often share their Spotify accounts with other users. For example, a family member accessing their accounts through a shared smart speaker or smart TV in the living room, or a teenager taking over CarPlay while driving.

Users may also listen to music they don’t want to characterize as their “taste,” such as sleep sounds, quiet songs to play at night, or music to entertain children. Users don’t always remember which tracks or playlists they need to delete, nor do they have the time to go back and delete them. This can clutter your taste profile with music you don’t like.

It has also significantly impacted and even ruined many people’s annual Wrapped experience on the app, especially since kids are using their parents’ Spotify accounts. For years, Spotify users have been asking for a fix for this issue.

Spotify says the Taste Profiles feature will roll out in New Zealand in the coming weeks, and then expand to other markets.