Spotify Gives U.S. Listeners More Control Over Its Recommendation Algorithm

Spotify Gives U.S. Listeners More Control Over Its Recommendation Algorithm

Taste Profile lets Premium users tell Spotify what they want more, or less, of instead of leaving recommendations entirely to inferred listening behavior.
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gizmo guru
Sep 23, 2026
2 min read

Spotify is expanding its Taste Profile beta to U.S. Premium subscribers aged 18 and older, giving listeners a direct way to influence what appears on the Home feed rather than relying only on inferred behavior. The feature had already been tested in New Zealand earlier this year.

Taste Profile shows Spotify’s short interpretation of a person’s interests across music, podcasts and audiobooks. Users can then type instructions describing what they want more of, what they are tired of, or what they would like to explore. Spotify says those notes act as guidance for future Home recommendations, with changes typically appearing within a few hours.

The move pushes recommendation systems toward a more explicit model of user intent. Machine learning has long been used to estimate what audiences might enjoy, including research on predicting song popularity from listener signals. Spotify’s new approach adds a conversational control layer so users can tell the system what they want instead of forcing the algorithm to infer everything from listening history.

That shift also answers a recurring concern around opaque recommendation systems and user agency. Users can edit or delete Taste Profile notes at any time, or ignore the feature and continue using Spotify normally.

For now, the beta applies to the mobile app for eligible Premium users in the U.S. and New Zealand.

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