Spotify Taste Profile: Now You Can Edit Your Own Music Algorithm

Spotify is giving users more control over their music recommendations than ever before. The streaming giant announced a new Spotify Taste Profile feature at SXSW that allows Premium listeners to see and directly modify the algorithmic model that powers their personalized playlists. This represents a major shift in how the company approaches user personalization and data transparency.

Co-CEO Gustav Söderström unveiled Taste Profile during the conference, describing it as a revolutionary step in user control. The feature surfaces the algorithmic model Spotify has been building about each listener's music preferences and, crucially, lets users modify it directly. If you have ever created custom preferences inside an AI chatbot app, Spotify's Taste Profile works in a remarkably similar way.

How Spotify Taste Profile Works

Taste Profile lets you see how Spotify understands your taste and shape it yourself, giving you the ability to steer what you see on the Spotify homepage. According to TechCrunch, this is the first time users can review and edit their Taste Profile, the algorithmically generated model of their music preferences. Previously, Spotify users could only remove certain artists or songs from their recommendations, but those tools were not comprehensive.

The new Spotify Taste Profile provides a complete view of your listening data in one place within the app, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. This represents a significant shift in how Spotify approaches personalization. The company has long been known for its algorithmic recommendations, including Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and the wildly popular year-end review feature Spotify Wrapped. Now, users can directly influence these recommendations rather than simply reacting to them.

Beta Rollout and Expansion Plans

The beta will begin in New Zealand, a market Spotify has used repeatedly for early-stage testing of AI-adjacent features. This includes the initial Prompted Playlist launch, which started in New Zealand before expanding to Premium users in the US and Canada in late January 2026, and subsequently to subscribers in Australia, Ireland, Sweden, and the UK in February.

According to The Next Web, Spotify says the Taste Profile feature will roll out in the coming weeks in New Zealand before expanding to other markets. The company has not yet announced when the feature will be available to US users, but the rapid expansion of Prompted Playlist suggests it may not be long.

This announcement comes roughly two months after Spotify expanded Prompted Playlist, a separate but related feature that lets users generate playlists by describing what they want in natural language. Together, these features represent Spotify's commitment to giving users more control over their listening experience. The move also positions Spotify competitively in the increasingly crowded streaming market.

As Apple Music and other competitors improve their recommendation algorithms, Spotify is differentiating itself by giving users unprecedented access to and control over the data that drives their music discovery. This follows a broader trend of companies giving users more control over AI-generated recommendations in the technology industry.

The average Spotify Premium subscriber listens to 200 artists every month, and nearly half of those artists are discovered for the first time through recommendations. According to data from the LA Times, this discovery aspect has been crucial to Spotify's success in the streaming market. With the new Spotify Taste Profile feature, users can now ensure those discoveries align more closely with their actual preferences rather than what the algorithm assumes they might like.

Spotify's approach reflects a growing awareness in the tech industry about the importance of algorithmic transparency and user data control. Users are increasingly demanding to know how their data is being used and want tools to shape their digital experiences. By giving users direct access to modify their Taste Profile, Spotify is setting a new standard for transparency in music streaming services.

The streaming industry has evolved significantly over the past decade, with Spotify growing into the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service. The company paid over $11 billion to the music industry last year alone, demonstrating the scale of its impact on the music ecosystem. The introduction of Taste Profile represents another step in the company's evolution.

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