Summary
- Spotify uses your Taste Profile to personalize music suggestions based on your preferences – no set place to locate it.
- Improve your Taste Profile by excluding playlists from your suggestions to pivot away from certain genres.
- Changing your Taste Profile is a gradual process that requires retraining the algorithm by listening to different genres.
Using a streaming music service means you want your music to be as accessible as you can. It’s much different than using CDs, records, or even turning on those music channels that come with cable packages. With streaming music services, you can listen to your music in the car, on your phone, through your smart speakers, and on your computer without much issue.
Spotify is one of the premiere options for a reason. It offers millions of songs, podcasts, and audiobooks for listeners to enjoy. You can even listen to Spotify from your smartwatch and take it offline to listen even when you don’t have service. Whether you have the free account or Spotify Premium, you get the same great interface and service. The Spotify interface is slightly different on mobile versus browser, but it does offer you a ton of unique features.
One of those unique features is your Taste Profile. This is how Spotify learns what you like to listen to and what you’re currently vibing with at the point in time. Everybody’s music preferences change, at least slightly. Sure, we all still like to listen to the music we did when we were teenagers and we’ll never grow out of that. But there’s so much more to listen to and your Taste Profile tries to help you get there.
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Spotify
Spotify is a popular audio streaming platform that offers music, audiobooks, and podcasts. It can be used on mobile and on desktop, allowing you to listen to music in a ton of different places. You can even download music to your smartwatch.
What is your Spotify Taste Profile?
This is what you like to listen to
When you first start using Spotify, the platform doesn’t know what kind of music you like. But as soon as you search for and listen to a song, it starts to track data. The data helps build your algorithm. This is similar to how it comes up with your Spotify Wrapped presentation and highlights the categories and genres of music that you listen to the most. But after a while, Spotify starts to get a fuller picture as to what you actually like to listen to.
The Taste Profile is just that: it’s a profile of your musical tastes. Maybe you like to listen to pop music and occasionally classical. You can be pretty sure that Vitamin String Quartet or 2 Cellos are likely to be suggested to you, as both of those groups perform classical versions of pop songs. Maybe Spotify won’t take your suggestions that literally but that’s kind of how it works. The program learns what you like and starts to make suggestions based off of that. Eventually, your entire homepage is based on your Taste Profile.
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Where to find your Taste Profile?
It’s not spelled out for you anywhere
There is no real place to find your Taste Profile on Spotify. If there’s anywhere that you can track it, it is on your homepage. Whether you’re using mobile or browser, the opening screen that comes up when you up the program is your homepage. This is where you can see what you’ve listened to recently, what new music or podcasts are available on the streamer, and what Spotify thinks you might want to listen to next.The more you use the service, the better crafted the suggestions are to you. Each week, you’ll see Discover Weekly or Made for You playlists. The Discover Weekly playlists are based on artists that you’ve listened to or artist that are similar to ones that you’ve listened to before. The Made for You playlists are comprised of songs that you’ve listened to before. Spotify uses its algorithm to build all of those based on what you like to listen to.
The program learns what you like and starts to make suggestions based off of that.
The more eclectic your tastes are, the more different the suggestions will be. Eventually, your homepage will be filled with Discover Weekly, Made for You, and then other suggestions for songs, artists, podcasts, and more that are similar to what you’ve listened to frequently. On Fridays, Spotify highlights new music that has dropped that week with New Music Friday. All of the suggestions are based on the types of music or artists you tend to opt for. As I’m someone who really likes classical music and dance music, my New Music Friday typically highlights those two options.
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How to change your Taste Profile
There are a few steps you can take
If you’re looking at your Spotify homepage and are realizing it doesn’t quite capture the music you want to listen to, you can go about changing it. Unfortunately, because Spotify does take time to build its recommendations for you, it will also take time to reset the algorithm a bit. This will cause you to listen to different genres to retrain the program. If you previously were in an emo-heavy phase and want to stop seeing suggestions for that kind of music, you might want to listen to country music or rap for a while.
But you can also help Spotify out by getting rid of some of the suggestions it offers. Providing it with a helping hand to let it know that you want to pivot away from what it suggests is not only smart, but it’s also easy. When you’re on the homepage, and you’re looking at a playlist that Spotify has suggested for you, either a Made for You, a part of New Music Friday, or even just a playlist that is listed on the homepage for another reason, you can right-click on browser or go into the playlist and click the … button and then tap “exclude from my taste profile.”
This step will let Spotify know that you aren’t interested in that suggestion and it will stop suggesting playlists like that to you. That starts to signal to it that your music tastes are changing or just that the suggestions they are offering aren’t of interest to you.
Exclusion of a playlist for your Taste Profile takes 48 hours to go into effect, according to Spotify.
The only things that you can remove from your Taste Profile are playlists. Hiding individual songs from a specific playlist does not do the same thing. That only stops that specific song from being played on that specific playlist. But that won’t change your Taste Profile as the genres and artists are what make up the profile. Any songs that you listen to on an excluded playlist will not count towards your Spotify Wrapped but the time you spent listening to them will. Lastly, Spotify does allow you to look back at all the playlists that you’ve excluded by contacting them.
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