Spotify might finally let you tell it what you actually like

Spotify’s recommendations can feel eerily accurate at times, but certainly not all the time. Right now, if your Home feed or Discover Weekly starts skewing in a direction you don’t like, your only real option is to tweak what you play or manually exclude certain tracks and playlists from your Taste Profile. But it looks like Spotify may soon give you a more direct way to steer the algorithm.

At the moment, your Spotify Taste Profile is built from what you listen to and how you listen. It powers recommendations like Discover Weekly and shapes summaries such as Wrapped and Blend. If something is distorting your recommendations — say, a sleep playlist you run every night — you can exclude that playlist or specific tracks from your Taste Profile. Spotify says those exclusions take effect within 48 hours and reduce the extent to which those streams influence future recommendations and taste summaries.

The key limitation is that this system is mostly exclusionary. You can remove signals that don’t represent your real taste, but you can’t directly tell Spotify what you’re currently into or what kind of music phase you’re in, other than by slowly training it in the tracks you choose to play.

In Spotify version 9.1.28.385, we spotted code strings referencing a new Notes feature tied to your Taste Profile. The feature appears to let you add written feedback that helps “influence what you see on Home.” One string reads, “Tell us more about you,” while another clarifies, “Your notes help influence what you see on Home.” There’s even an example placeholder text, “I’ve been listening to a lot of…” that suggests the kind of free-form input Spotify may be aiming for.

Here are the relevant strings we spotted:

Based on the strings, you’ll be able to add, edit, and delete notes linked to your Taste Profile. Spotify also appears to be placing limits on both the number of notes you can create and the number of characters per note. If you hit the cap, you’ll need to delete an existing note before adding another, and deleting one will reduce its impact on your Taste Profile.

We haven’t activated this feature yet, and it looks like the testing phase is still being built. However, if this rolls out, it would add a more proactive layer of personalization. It’s also one of those progressions that you might not have considered, but once you do, the only real surprise is that it hadn’t been introduced earlier. In the same way you might fill out the Instructions section to help ChatGPT or Gemini respond to your chats in a preferred way, why shouldn’t you be able to directly interact with the AI behind Spotify’s algorithm?

We also found signs of a smaller social upgrade in the same build. A string reading “Pick custom emoji reactions for chat messages” suggests Spotify may allow users to customize emoji reactions in Spotify Messages.

Spotify Messages already supports reactions, but they’re limited to six standard emojis when responding to things like a friend’s Listening Activity. Allowing custom emoji reactions would expand that system, giving users more flexibility in how they respond in chats.

As always with APK teardowns, features uncovered in app code aren’t guaranteed to launch publicly. Spotify may refine, delay, or drop these additions altogether. However, some features in testing seem more likely to arrive than others, and these ones seem to be good bets to get a beta runout in the coming months. After all, many users are likely to appreciate greater control over their recommendations.