Spotify Adds a Way to Exclude Songs From Recommendations
The update should give listeners control over their playlists instead of letting the algorithm run wild.
Spotify’s recommendation engine has always had a mind of its own. Play one guilty pleasure track and suddenly your Discover Weekly thinks you’ve pivoted your entire personality. Now, Spotify is giving you another way to push back with a small but surprisingly powerful tool that helps you exclude individual songs from your Taste Profile.
The new feature, rolling out globally across web, desktop, and mobile for both free and Premium users, means you can tap the three-dot menu on any track or playlist and hit “Exclude from your Taste Profile.” Spotify says this will “lessen the impact of both past and future streams of that song on your recommendations.” That basically means your Spotify Wrapped won’t be hijacked by that one time you played “Baby Shark” for your niece or went on a late-night Shrek soundtrack binge.
This isn’t the first time Spotify has tried to hand users more influence over its notoriously opaque recommendation machine. Over the past few years, the company has quietly been building a toolkit of what I’d call “algorithm control knobs.” Enhance, for example, lets you bulk up playlists with AI-suggested tracks. Blend fuses your Taste Profile with someone else’s to generate a hybrid playlist. There’s also the option to exclude entire playlists from shaping your recs.
Emmanuel Umahi
The new Exclude feature sits neatly in that lineup, offering finer-grained control. It also acknowledges something obvious but rarely spoken: algorithms aren’t perfect proxies for people. Sometimes you just want to listen to a one-off track without it rewriting who Spotify thinks you are.
It's also particularly interesting that Spotify is rolling out this feature only a few months away from Wrapped season—the one time of year Spotify’s algorithm steps into the spotlight and shows you what it’s been learning. Wrapped is fun, but it can also expose how little control you’ve had over the data that defines your music identity. Exclude could give listeners a chance to clean up their feeds before the big reveal.
On a bigger level, this push reflects a shift in how streaming platforms balance algorithmic personalization with user agency. TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify all thrive on data-driven recommendations, but they’re also realizing that if users feel trapped by their algorithm, they lose trust. Giving listeners small but meaningful ways to steer the machine keeps people engaged and less likely to rage-quit when their feed goes off the rails.
Emmanuel Umahi
