Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 23
Spotify Rolls Out Taste Profile to U.S. Premium Users, Letting 18+ Listeners Rewrite Recommendations
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 23

Spotify Rolls Out Taste Profile to U.S. Premium Users, Letting 18+ Listeners Rewrite Recommendations

3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Sep 23

Summary

  • Spotify on Wednesday began rolling out Taste Profile to U.S. Premium subscribers, giving listeners 18 and older direct control over how the app’s Home feed recommendations are shaped.
  • Natural-language prompts let users ask for more variety or more or less of a genre, artist, vibe, podcast or audiobook category, with updated suggestions appearing after a few hours.
  • The beta feature exposes Spotify’s view of a user’s tastes across music and other audio, addressing a long-running complaint that its algorithm can over-repeat similar content or be skewed by sleep sounds and shared-account listening.
  • Taste Profile was first unveiled at SXSW in March and had been limited to beta users in New Zealand; its U.S. debut brings the test to Spotify’s biggest market by traffic and revenue.
  • Spotify has not said when the feature will expand beyond U.S. Premium users, though it builds on earlier controls such as excluding tracks or playlists and a kids-music toggle.

Insights

Can Spotify's new AI Taste Profile truly fix your ruined algorithm, or will natural language requests just confuse the system further?
How will Spotify's crackdown on AI personas and kids' music influence the future of personalized streaming for shared household accounts?
With Spotify rolling out manual algorithmic controls, are we witnessing the end of serendipitous music discovery in favor of curated echo chambers?