It’s clear that Spotify has been working to respond to user feedback. They’ve just rolled out another great feature—listeners can now edit their Taste Profile—helping music streaming to be even more of a personal experience. Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström revealed this news during a keynote at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. He touched on how shared accounts influence the Wrapped experience that Spotify provides on the platform.
Many Spotify users have expressed frustration over the presence of children’s music in their Wrapped summaries, which can diminish the personal touch of this year-end feature. Without shared accounts—largely used in the family plan context, though most people don’t use Spotify that way—kids’ whims can dominate the adult listening experience. As you can imagine, this left parents drowning in kids’ songs that aren’t even close to the type of music you listen to.
Our new editing feature addresses these concerns directly. It gives power back to those users, allowing them to examine their Taste Profile and curate it — an algorithmically generated model that illustrates a user’s music preferences. Users can now tell listeners to stop recommending a certain genre or song. All this entails is that they will no longer need to stress over lullabies or other nursery rhymes influencing their music selections. This accessibility feature is particularly helpful for shared households with several family members. Now even preschoolers can turn on their favorite character’s YouTube account with smart speakers or smart TVs.
Furthermore, the new functionality will allow users to view all their listening data in one consolidated location within the app. This far-reaching data includes music, podcasts, and audiobooks, giving a very holistic picture of the types of media a user consumes. This new feature goes live in beta today for Premium listeners in New Zealand. We’re happy to continue growing it in response to feedback from users!
At the same time, Spotify leans into the many ways their listeners want to experience the audio-only platform as they enable this new editing functionality. Teens might simply use CarPlay to download playlists from a shared account to the car, which adds even more layers to the growing complexity of personalized listening experiences. Removing non-eligible tracks will strengthen user agency. This feature will ensure that their Taste Profile is an accurate representation of their unique personal taste.