Spotify announced a new beta feature called “Taste Profile,” which lets listeners review and directly influence the platform’s recommendation system. The feature is designed to give users more transparency and control over how Spotify interprets their listening habits and determines what content appears on their homepage.
The announcement was made during SXSW by Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström. According to the company, the feature represents the next step in Spotify’s push to make personalization more transparent and responsive to individual preferences.
Taste Profile brings together signals from across music, podcasts, and audiobooks to build a unified understanding of a user’s listening habits. Spotify says the system analyzes the artists, genres, and patterns that define a listener’s day-to-day activity, such as discovering new genres or gravitating toward certain music styles.
Users will be able to review how Spotify interprets their preferences and adjust them if the algorithm gets something wrong. For example, listeners can flag when recommendations do not match their interests or request more or less of certain artists, genres, or moods. The feedback will influence what content is prioritized, reduced, or newly surfaced in recommendations on the Spotify homepage.
Spotify said the feature is also designed to capture context around listening habits and current interests. For example, a user training for a marathon may want more upbeat music for workouts, while someone commuting may prefer more news podcasts during weekday mornings.
The company said listeners can either actively modify their Taste Profile or leave it unchanged and continue using Spotify normally. The feature builds on Spotify’s broader push to make personalization tools more interactive, following recent launches like Prompted Playlists, which lets users generate playlists based on prompts tied to listening history or moods.
The Taste Profile beta will begin rolling out to Spotify Premium users in New Zealand in the coming weeks. Spotify plans to expand the feature beyond the initial test market, but it hasn’t given a specific timeline yet.
