Spotify began rolling out Taste Profile to US Premium subscribers age 18 and up on Wednesday, giving listeners direct control over the AI system that decides what music and podcasts they see. The feature lets users read how Spotify has classified their taste and then rewrite that classification in plain English. It is the largest test yet of an approach that has been running in beta in New Zealand since March.
Taste Profile is powered by Spotify's AI and touches nearly every recommendation surface the company runs. That includes the Home feed, the Discover Weekly playlist, Made for You picks, and the annual Spotify Wrapped review. Until now, users could only exclude individual tracks or playlists from influencing their profile, plus a recently added toggle that keeps kids' music from polluting a parent's account.
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström first showed the feature at SXSW in Austin in March 2026. The US rollout puts it in front of Spotify's largest market by both traffic and revenue, a meaningful jump in scale from the New Zealand beta.
Key facts
- 01Spotify launched Taste Profile to US Premium subscribers age 18 and up on Wednesday, expanding from a New Zealand beta.
- 02Users edit recommendations via natural language prompts; the Home Page reflects the changes after a few hours.
- 03The feature reshapes suggestions across Discover Weekly, Made for You, and Spotify Wrapped.
- 04Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström first unveiled Taste Profile at SXSW in Austin in March 2026.
- 05The tool is powered by Spotify's AI and remains in beta with no announced timeline for wider rollout.
The mechanic is straightforward. A user taps their profile picture, scrolls to Taste Profile, and sees Spotify's current read on their preferences across music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Under a prompt labeled "Tell us more," the listener types what they want to change and sends the message. After a few hours, the Home Page reflects a different mix.
The requests can be broad or narrow. A user can ask for more variety, less of a specific genre, a different era, or a shift in energy level. They can also strip out signal that muddies the algorithm, such as sleep sounds played overnight or a teenager's in-car listening on a shared account. Podcast and audiobook recommendations respond to the same prompt system.
The underlying problem Spotify is trying to fix is well documented by its own users. The recommendation engine, widely credited as the company's competitive moat, tends to over-index on recent listening and lock users into narrow loops. A listener who spent a week on ambient work music can find their Discover Weekly stripped of everything else they care about, with no obvious lever to reset it.
Natural language editing is the lever. Instead of relying on Spotify to infer intent from skips and saves, the user states the intent directly. That shifts a chunk of the personalization work from implicit signal to explicit instruction, which is the same design pattern that has made chat interfaces attractive across consumer AI products in the past two years.
The feature is still in beta and Spotify has not committed to a broader timeline or an international rollout beyond the US and New Zealand markets. The 18-and-up age gate suggests the company is being cautious about how the tool interacts with younger listeners and family plan dynamics, where recommendation contamination is a real complaint but also a sensitive area for content controls.
Whether users actually engage with the editor is the open question. Spotify's recommendation systems have historically worked because they demand nothing of the listener, and asking people to write a paragraph about their taste is a much higher-friction interaction than pressing play. The New Zealand beta gave Spotify enough signal to greenlight the US launch, but engagement at scale in a market of tens of millions of Premium accounts is a different test.
For Spotify, Taste Profile is a bet that giving users a steering wheel deepens loyalty on a platform where the switching cost is mostly the algorithm itself. If a listener can shape Discover Weekly the way they want it, the playlist becomes harder to replicate on Apple Music or YouTube Music. That defensive value is likely worth more to Spotify than any short-term engagement lift the feature produces, and it is the clearest reason the company is willing to hand over the keys.
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