Spotify announced a new feature on Wednesday that allows users to take more control over their recommendations. The service will now let users exclude certain tracks from influencing their taste profile. This taste profile refers to the streamer’s sense of your personal musical taste and interests, and it drives Spotify’s recommendations, including your Discovery Weekly, Home page selections, annual Wrapped experience, and Blend playlists with friends.
The company had previously provided a way for users to exclude certain playlists from their taste profile, but this did not solve the overall problem of having music you do not enjoy influence Spotify’s recommendations. The playlist feature was more useful for making sure your sleep music did not lead to more new age or white noise suggestions.
With this new option, you can move through your recently played items to tell Spotify that there are some songs you were playing but do not actually like. Parents everywhere will likely rejoice at this development.
To use the feature, both free and premium users can tap the three dots on the top-right corner of their screen after selecting the song they want to exclude. Users can then choose to exclude the song from their taste profile or include a previously excluded song.
Spotify’s hyper-personalization has been a long-time key selling point for the service. However, there are many scenarios where the ingestion of everything you listen to into algorithms does not make sense. Families, particularly those with small children, immediately come to mind. Users also often share their Spotify account while in the car with friends and family, allowing others to take their turn at playing DJ. The growing number of smart speakers in the home has also led some members of the household to become the default Spotify account holder associated with everyone’s taste.
Given the wide range of scenarios, manually excluding tracks is a nice workaround, but it is not the best solution. Ideally, users would be able to more easily switch between profiles, perhaps even by using voice commands, as you are often listening while driving. The app could also offer a way to tap to associate an entire listening session with one family member or the other, instead of forcing you to go through songs one by one.
In any event, the feature will at least offer some recourse for those who have longed to have their Spotify Wrapped not ruined by the kids’ music.