Spotify is finally letting you fix your recommendations. Even if your kids broke them
Taste Profile lets you edit how Spotify sees your listening habits. So long, Spidey soundtrack
If, like me, you’ve opened Spotify only to find the homepage full of nursery rhymes, lullabies, or cartoon soundtracks thanks to your child’s listening habits, Spotify might mercifully have a fix that could increase its standing in our list of the best music streaming services.
The streaming service has announced a new Taste Profile feature that lets users see – and tweak – how Spotify interprets their listening habits. In other words, you’ll be able to correct the algorithm when shared listening, background audio, or one-off music phases start hijacking your recommendations.
It’s not just children causing chaos either (though they’re naturally very good at that). Other things that have skewed my recommendations are my eclectic sleep sound sessions, including my favourite – 12 hours of uninterrupted brown noise.
But while I appreciate the soft, dulcet tones of static sending me off into the dreamworld, I’d rather not have it cluttering up my Spotify home screen – which is why I’m cautiously optimistic about this new Spotify feature.
Of course, Spotify already builds a behind-the-scenes model of your preferences based on everything you listen to across music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and this all feeds into many of the app’s recommendation systems. Overall, it helps shape what appears on the home screen and across Spotify’s personalised experiences – including things like the year-end Spotify Wrapped.
Until now, though, that system has largely been invisible – and mostly impossible to correct when it gets the wrong idea.
Taste Profile aims to change that by showing how Spotify categorises your listening habits, from the artists and genres you gravitate towards to broader patterns in how you use the app.
If something looks off, you can ask Spotify to lean more heavily into certain styles or dial others back. Those adjustments, in theory, can then influence what Spotify prioritises on your home screen, shaping what the app suggests next.
Spotify also says that the new feature is designed to reflect context as well as pure listening history. That means it could recognise things like workout music in the morning, podcasts during a weekday commute, or other routine listening habits without letting them permanently define your overall taste.
Announced at SXSW by Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström, Taste Profile will begin rolling out as a beta to Premium listeners in New Zealand in the coming weeks. With any luck, it’ll work as planned, and roll out to the rest of us sometime this year.
Esat Dedezade
Contributor 
