Announced at SXSW by CEO Gustav Söderström, the feature allows Premium listeners to see and shape the data model that powers their recommendations, starting in beta in New Zealand.
For a decade, Spotify’s recommendation engine has been largely silent. It watched what you played, noted what you skipped, made sense of the time of day and the pace of your commute, and never told you what it was up to. On Friday, at SXSW in Austin, the company decided to change that.
Gustav Söderström, CEO of Spotify Revealed the Taste Profile: a new feature that reflects the algorithmic model the platform builds about each listener and allows users to change it directly. The beta will begin rolling out to Premium subscribers in New Zealand in the coming weeks.
The premise is simple enough. The Taste Profile combines listening behavior across music, podcasts and audiobooks into a single view: recently explored genres, most listened to artists, patterns that set the listening day.
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If a user notices that the profile is wrong, that the music they played years ago is too heavy, or that they missed a stage where they were working quietly, they can flag it. They may want more or less of a certain vibe. They can describe current context, training for an event, weekday commute, and the system will take that into account when deciding what to put on Spotify’s homepage.
“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 that more than 80% of its listeners cite customization as the thing they value most about the service. The claim, which the company has been citing in various forms since at least 2023, positions algorithmic curation as the main reason people stay, not just as a feature.
The competitive logic behind Taste Profile follows directly from this: if personalization is a product, giving users more control over it is a way to deepen their investment in it.
The announcement comes about two months after Spotify’s Expanded Suggested Playlist, which lets users create playlists by describing what they want in natural language, will roll out from an initial New Zealand test to Premium users in the US and Canada at the end of January 2026, followed by subscribers in Australia, Ireland and Sweden. The sequence is deliberate.
Both features make the same basic argument: the future of streaming personalization is collaborative, not passive.
While On Demand Playlist is generative, creating something new from an image, Taste Profile is corrective. It works with an existing model, giving users the chance to check and adjust what their listening years have written about them.
Whether someone is a casual customer of the algorithm (plays everything that appears on the homepage, not particularly careful) or has strong opinions about the direction its recommendations are taking, this feature is designed to cover both. “You can customize your Enjoyment Profile as much as you want,” the company said in an announcement, “or leave it and enjoy Spotify as usual.”
The beta will begin in New Zealand, a market Spotify has repeatedly used for early-stage testing of AI-adjacent features, including the initial Prompted Playlist launch. No timeline has been given for a wider global rollout. Taste Profile will only be available to Premium subscribers; there was no indication when or if it would be available for free tier accounts.
Spotify is celebrating 2026 as its 20th anniversary, and this week its SXSW presence is calibrated accordingly, with concerts, a headline session with Söderström, country artist Lainey Wilson and podcast host David Friedberg.
The Taste Profile announcement fell on the final day of the company’s main SXSW programming, and a product note to accompany the celebration.
Beyond functionality, what the feature represents is a change in how Spotify builds relationships with listeners. The algorithm has always existed; the company now claims that knowing it’s there and having some say in what it does is a feature in itself.
