Spotify now lets you exclude songs from your taste profile for better recommendations

Spotify is rolling out a control that lets you keep specific songs from shaping your Taste Profile. Excluding outliers, think kids’ tracks, novelty tunes, sleep sounds, holiday music, or one-off study/workout playlists prevents them from skewing Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mixes, and other personalized rows. You can toggle exclusion per track, and it won’t remove the song from your library or playlists. The result: cleaner signals, fewer false positives, and recommendations that match your real listening.

Spotify revealed a tool that hands listeners more say over what powers their recommendations. You can now prevent specific songs from shaping your personal “taste profile.” That profile is Spotify’s internal picture of what you like, which feeds picks across your Weekly Discover mixes, Home rows, year-end recap, friend “Blend” playlists, and beyond.

Previously, Spotify let you block entire playlists from affecting that profile, but stray tracks could still muddy the waters. That option mainly helped keep sleep sounds or white noise from spawning more of the same.

With the new control, you can scan your recent plays and mark songs you spun but don’t actually want counted. (Parents everywhere can breathe easier).To try it, free and Premium listeners open a track, tap the three dots in the top-right, and choose to exclude it from the taste profile or reverse an earlier exclusion.

Ultra-personalization is a marquee feature for Spotify, yet not every listen should train the algorithm. Families especially with young kids are an obvious edge case. Road trips and gatherings often mean friends or relatives DJ on your account.  And in smart-speaker households, one person’s login can end up representing everyone’s choices.

Given all that, manually filtering tracks is a helpful stopgap, but not perfect. A smoother fix would be quick profile switching even by voice for situations like driving. Another idea: let you tag an entire listening session to a particular household member instead of auditing track by track.

At minimum, this update gives people a way to keep kids’ tunes from hijacking their year-end stats.

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Source: techcrunch‍