Spotify Taste Profile Lets US Listeners Steer Podcast Recommendations

Spotify began rolling out Taste Profile to U.S. Premium subscribers this week, letting listeners see how the service interprets their habits across music, podcasts, and audiobooks—and send natural-language requests to reshape Home-feed recommendations, TechCrunch and TechRadar reported.

The feature, first shown at SXSW in March by co-CEO Gustav Söderström and earlier tested in New Zealand, is available in beta to Premium users 18 and older in the United States. On mobile, listeners open their profile photo, scroll to Taste Profile, review Spotify’s current read of their taste, then use a “Tell us more” box to ask for more of a genre, mood, or topic—or less of one they want to mute, according to both outlets.

For podcast fans, that control matters as much as it does for music. TechRadar noted that Spotify’s Podcasts hub often surfaces the biggest titles first, making niche discovery slower. Taste Profile lets users request more shows on specific subjects—classic cinema, particular true-crime eras, technology, history, or art—and expects Home suggestions to adjust within a few hours. TechCrunch likewise said listeners can tell Spotify what sort of podcasts and audiobooks they want so those recommendations improve alongside Discover Weekly and Made for You music rails.

Spotify frames Taste Profile as the listener-facing layer of the same taste graph that powers flagship products, including Discover Weekly and the annual Wrapped recap. Giving Premium users a direct chat-like interface to that graph is a shift from purely passive signals such as skips, saves, and “Don’t play this artist.” The company has not announced a timeline for free-tier access or for markets beyond the U.S. beta, TechCrunch reported.

The timing lands as podcast platforms compete on both recommendation quality and monetization. Apple this week advanced subscriber video inside Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, while Spotify continues to lean on video consumption growth and Partner Program payouts in more countries. Taste Profile does not itself create a new podcast paywall; instead it tries to keep listeners inside Spotify’s Home feed by making podcast suggestions feel less random and more editable.

Access is still gated. TechRadar described a beta rollout that may not appear for every Premium account immediately, and Spotify has not published a full feature roadmap for Taste Profile beyond Home-feed tuning. Early coverage stresses that longtime power users with years of listening history may notice smaller changes than newer subscribers whose recommendation graphs are still thin.

Dataconomy’s same-week coverage of the U.S. rollout echoed the Premium-only beta framing and underlined that Taste Profile is meant to change Home recommendations rather than rebuild every playlist surface at once. That narrower scope still matters for podcasts: a listener who types “more investigative reporting, fewer celebrity interview shows” is steering discovery dollars and attention toward mid-sized topic experts—the same mid-tier inventory advertisers have been told is underused relative to celebrity titles.

Readers following industry product news on Podcast News will see this U.S. Taste Profile launch as distinct from Apple Maps Hidden Histories location links and Apple Podcasts subscriber-video packages already on the slate. The story here is listener control over podcast topic recommendations inside Spotify’s own algorithm surface.

If Taste Profile sticks, podcasters may find that topical clarity in show notes and episode titles matters even more, because listeners can now ask the app for “more history podcasts” or “fewer celebrity interview shows” in plain language. For now, the U.S. Premium beta is the clearest look yet at Spotify letting audiences edit the podcast half of its taste graph directly.