Spotify Lets U.S. Premium Listeners Steer Home Recommendations With Taste Profile

A Spotify account can remember what someone played without knowing what they want to hear next. Spotify is rolling out Taste Profile to U.S. Premium listeners ages 18 and older, giving them a view of how it interprets their interests and a way to write requests that steer their Home feed. The beta offers more say over recommendations, though Spotify describes those requests as guidance, not commands.

From removing songs to describing a taste

Spotify already lets listeners keep a particular track or playlist from shaping recommendations through Exclude from Taste Profile. It also offers parents a way to stop kids’ and family music from influencing their recommendations. Those controls address listening that sends the wrong signal. The new feature lets a listener state what signal they would rather send, including an interest that their play history may not yet show.

Taste Profile shows a brief account of how Spotify understands someone’s interests across music, podcasts and audiobooks. A listener can then type a note asking for more or less of something. Requests can be broad, such as more variety, or specific to an artist, genre or mood. Spotify also suggests using the feature to explore a music era that the listener has not sought out before.

That difference is useful for more than fixing an unwanted song. A listener could ask for music with a different energy or tell Spotify which podcast and audiobook topics interest them. TechCrunch also points to a familiar mismatch: sleep sounds or someone else’s music may appear regularly in an account’s listening history without representing the account holder’s tastes. A note offers a way to express that preference; Spotify does not promise to erase the listening history behind it.

An instruction, not a playlist order

Spotify calls the notes “gentle guidance” for its Home feed. That is a narrower promise than letting people choose exactly what appears next. Someone asking for a new genre should expect the request to influence Spotify’s suggestions, not produce a fixed queue of songs. The same distinction applies to podcast or audiobook topics: the listener supplies a direction, while Spotify still selects what to surface.

The distinction also limits what the new control tells a listener. Taste Profile displays Spotify’s brief interpretation of their interests, not a detailed explanation of how each recommendation was chosen. The written request gives them a way to challenge that interpretation directly. Whether the resulting suggestions feel different enough to satisfy someone who wants to branch out remains a question for the beta.

To try it, eligible listeners open the Spotify mobile app, tap their profile picture and select Taste Profile. They can read the summary, enter a request under “Tell us more” and send it. Spotify says Home-feed changes typically appear within a few hours. Notes can be edited or deleted at any time, so a request to explore a new sound need not become a permanent preference.

The U.S. rollout tests a broader audience

This is not Taste Profile’s debut. Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström introduced it at SXSW in March, and Spotify first tested it with listeners in New Zealand. The September rollout brings the beta to U.S. Premium listeners who are at least 18; eligible listeners in New Zealand can still access it. The company has not given a timeline for availability beyond those groups.

Listeners can also leave the profile untouched and keep using Spotify as usual. That makes the beta a choice about how actively to manage a recommendation feed: correct individual inputs, write a broader instruction or let Spotify infer interests from listening. The new option is most consequential when those signals disagree—when a person’s past plays are a poor guide to what they want next.