The feature, announced at SXSW by co-CEO Gustav Söderström, allows Premium listeners to see and shape the data model that powers their recommendations, starting with a beta launch in New Zealand.
For a decade, Spotify’s recommendation engine has largely operated silently. It watched what you played, noticed what you skipped, inferred the meaning of the time of day and the pace of your travel, and never told you what it had concluded. On Friday, at SXSW in Austin, the company decided to change that.
Gustav Söderström, co-CEO of Spotify, advertised taste profile– A new feature that shows the algorithmic model that the platform has been building on each listener and, crucially, allows users to modify it directly. The beta will begin rolling out to Premium subscribers in New Zealand in the coming weeks.
The premise is quite simple. Taste Profile aggregates a listener’s behavior across music, podcasts, and audiobooks in a single view: the recently explored genres, the most listened to artists, the patterns that define a listening day.
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When a user notices that the profile is incorrect, has too much music they listened to years ago, or is missing a phase they’ve been quietly working on, they can flag it. They may ask for more or less of a particular vibe. They can describe a current context, training for an event, commuting during the week, and the system will take this into account when deciding what to display on the Spotify home page.
“This is the next step in our vision to make personalization more transparent, responsive and truly yours.”Söderström told the SXSW audience.
Spotify cited an internal figure indicating that more than 80% of its listeners consider personalization what they value most about the service. The claim, which the company has referenced in various ways since at least 2023, positions algorithmic curation not just as a feature but as the main reason people stick around.
The competitive logic behind Taste Profile follows directly from that: if personalization is the product, giving users more control over it is a way to deepen their investment in it.
The announcement comes about two months after Spotify expanded Requested Playlisting, a separate but related feature that allows users to generate playlists by describing what they want in natural language, from its initial test in New Zealand to Premium users in the US and Canada in late January 2026, and subsequently to subscribers in Australia, Ireland, Sweden and the UK in February. The sequencing is deliberate.
Both features drive the same underlying argument: that the future of streaming personalization is collaborative, not passive.
While the requested playlist is generative, creating something new from a description, the flavor profile is corrective. It works with the model that already exists, giving users the opportunity to audit and adjust what years of listening have written about them.
Whether someone has been an accidental customer of the algorithm (playing what appeared on the home page, not particularly caring) or has strong opinions about the direction its recommendations have taken, the feature is designed to accommodate both. “You can shape your taste profile as much as you want,” the company said in its announcement, “or leave it and enjoy Spotify as usual.”
The beta will begin in New Zealand, a market that Spotify has repeatedly used for initial testing of AI-adjacent features, including the initial launch of the requested playlist. No timeline was given for a broader global rollout. Taste Profile will be available only to Premium subscribers; There was no indication of when or if it might come to free tier accounts.
Spotify is celebrating 2026 as its 20th anniversary year, and its presence at SXSW this week has been calibrated accordingly: concerts, a headlining session with Söderström, country artist Lainey Wilson and podcast host David Friedberg.
The Taste Profile announcement came on the final day of the company’s main SXSW lineup, providing a product note to accompany the celebration.
What the feature represents, beyond its functionality, is a change in the way Spotify frames its relationship with listeners. The algorithm has always existed; The company now defends that knowing that it is there and having a say in what it does is a characteristic in itself.
