- Spotify has announced a new taste profile feature
- It allows you to enter feedback and tell Spotify what recommendations you want
- Flavor profile could be the key to eliminating AI slop, but I hope it’s not short-lived
According to Spotify, ‘more than 80% of listeners’ say personalization features are the best thing about the music streaming service – so naturally, Spotify ups the ante even more on the personal listening front.
Today (March 13), Spotify unveiled a new tool that lets you see your taste profile front and center and directly control your algorithm by giving it notes. The feature was announced by Co-CEO Gustav Söderström at SXSW, and will first roll out over the next few weeks in beta to Premium subscribers in New Zealand.
Until now, your taste profile has remained hidden within the walls of the Spotify app. Now it sits right in the sidebar of the website, so you can see exactly how it understands your listening habits across music, podcasts and audiobooks, and updates as your listening behavior evolves. That’s not the most interesting part though; it allows you to edit and shape how your recommendations on the website evolve as much as you want.
The article continues below
Does your taste profile reveal your growing obsession with electronic music? Or that you’re slowly exploring 90s rock and its niche subgenres? You can ask it to give you more recommendations based on what you’re currently enjoying, or explore a completely different genre. If you come across recommendations that don’t quite fit what you’re looking for, you can ask Taste Profile for a more specific vibe, or ask it not to recommend certain music altogether, which I imagine will be the case for many avid listeners.
For many users out there, Spotify’s algorithm can be hit-or-miss, and its recommendations can fall flat, but for the first time Taste Profile gives you direct control over what you want to see more of in your feed – and what you want to see less of. This is a feature we’ve been waiting for since it was first spotted in code snippets a few weeks ago, and while I’m curious to test it myself, I fear it could go in one of two different directions.
There’s no doubt that Taste Profile adds a whole new layer to Spotify and is a first-of-its-kind feature that even its rivals haven’t tackled. Spotify has come under fire for flooding the platform with AI slop, and while I’ve largely managed to avoid such content, Taste Profile would be perfect for making sure it stops users running into it more than they want.
But it’s the precision factor that makes Taste Profile a contender to be one of the most valuable features to come from Spotify. Before its announcement, you could tailor your algorithm using a wide variety of tips and tricks; for example, excluding certain playlists from your taste profile or blocking individual artists from appearing in Spotify-generated playlists.
This works in the long run, but evolution takes time, whereas this new feature is designed to prioritize what you want to hear right here, right now. My biggest concern, however, is that Taste Profile will live a short life, like other personalization features, and only add more space to Spotify’s already cluttered interface.
As mentioned, I’ve found that in addition to creating and listening to my own playlists and using the ‘Fans Also Like’ section to find new artists, manually removing artists and playlists from my taste profile has worked wonders to tailor an algorithm that perfectly matches my listening preferences.
I’m confident that I’ve trained my algorithm to the point where I’m happy with the music it recommends, so I’m unsure how the new Taste Profile tab will benefit me further. It also raises the question of how well it listens to your feedback because, as I’ve found with tools like prompt playlists, you have to spend a lot of time editing prompts to get Spotify to give you exactly what you want. So my main concern is that I’ll get bored pretty quickly resulting in never using it again – I think Spotify should prioritize features like Song DNA.
Despite my reservations, I’m still curious to see how Taste Profile changes the game? Absolutely. On paper, it sounds like a handy feature for those struggling to tailor their algorithm – I just hope it doesn’t disappear into Spotify’s cluttered background.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also
