Spotify Expands User-Controlled Personalization Features
Spotify is expanding its "Prompted Playlists" feature, which allows Premium users to generate playlists from text prompts based on their listening history. The company is also testing a feature for users to edit their "taste profile" with written notes, giving them more direct control over algorithmic recommendations.
- The "taste profile" notes feature is an expansion of an existing tool that allows users to "Exclude from your Taste Profile". This earlier feature lets users prevent specific songs or entire playlists—like sleep music or kids' songs—from influencing their recommendations and year-end "Wrapped" summaries. - Code discovered within the Spotify app suggests the new "Notes" feature will allow users to add, edit, and delete written feedback to more directly influence their "Home" recommendations, with placeholder text indicating prompts like, "I've been listening to a lot of…". There will likely be a limit on the number of notes and characters a user can add. - For its "Prompted Playlists" and AI DJ features, Spotify is adapting open-source Large Language Models (LLMs), including Meta's Llama models. The company fine-tunes these models on a curated dataset that includes internal examples and data created by music experts to better understand user intent and musical context. - The technology behind these new features aims to create "personalized narratives," using LLMs to generate explanations for why a specific track was recommended, much like a friend would. Early tests have shown these AI-generated explanations can make listeners significantly more likely to try a new song recommendation. - Competitors are launching similar AI playlist features. Amazon's "Maestro," currently in beta in the U.S., allows users on all tiers (including free) to generate playlists from text and emoji prompts, though free users only get 30-second previews. - Apple is also testing an AI playlist generator called "Playlist Playground" in its iOS 26.4 beta. Powered by Apple Intelligence, it creates 25-song playlists from text prompts and allows for further editing. - The "Prompted Playlists" feature considers a user's entire listening history from their first day on the service, not just recent activity, to generate its playlists. Each track included in the generated playlist comes with a note explaining why it was chosen. - Beyond text prompts, Spotify has been steadily adding other layers of user control, including a "Snooze" feature to temporarily pause a track from recommendations for 30 days and "Smart Filters" to sort saved content by activity, mood, or genre.
