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

At the SXSW conference on Friday, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström was announced a new feature, now in beta, that will allow listeners for the first time to control and edit their taste profile, the algorithmically generated model of their music preferences.

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

Starting with Premium listeners initially 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 refine future suggestions by asking more or less of a specific vibe. Once this is done, the home page of the app will reflect a different set of suggestions.

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

Spotify has previously offered some tools for removing music from your taste profile, but they weren’t as comprehensive. Instead, users could only exclude certain tracks or playlists from their profile. Because of this and the largely hidden nature of taste profiling as a whole, Spotify users have often complained that the app’s recommendations don’t reflect their interests.

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

Other times, users may listen to music they don’t want to label as their ‘taste’, such as sleep sounds or quiet tracks they play at night, or music to entertain their children. Users don’t always remember which tracks or playlists need to be removed, nor do they have time to go back and do it. This can lead to the taste profile being filled with music that users don’t like.

Also important are affected, even damagedmany people’s year-round experience wrapped up in the app — particularly due to kids using their parents’ Spotify accounts. For years, Spotify users have asked for a fix for this problem.

Spotify says the Taste Profile feature will roll out in the coming weeks in New Zealand before rolling out to other markets.