- Spotify is reportedly testing a ‘Notes’ feature for direct feedback on Home recommendations
- Instead of simply excluding playlists or tracks, you may be able to pen notes
- Spotted by Android Authority, as code found in Spotify version 9.1.28.385
There’s no denying that Spotify’s suite of 2026 updates is strong, with the new ‘About the Song’ upgrade (providing back stories to the music you love) a recent highlight. And who could forget the new trio of Lyrics Translation perks? OK, Apple Music’s been providing something similar since last September, but together, they’ll definitely help you better understand Bad Bunny’s relationship with his auntie.
You know what’s not necessarily been great in 2026? The reported prevalence of AI slop in your Spotify Discover Weekly recommendations. And the thing is that currently, if your Discover Weekly or Home feed starts going off on an unpalatable tangent, your only way to mitigate is to manually exclude each track and/or playlists from your Taste Profile, or actively listen to different music to try and coax it back on track – and even this function was only released in October 2025.
But Spotify may soon give you a lot more control over how to steer the algorithm in your favor. How? By giving you the chance to offer written feedback and (hopefully) communicate directly with its AI learning models – yes, similar to giving a written prompt to ChatGPT or Gemini.
Right now, your Spotify Taste Profile is based directly on what you listen to, and how you listen, even if some of it wasn’t what you actively wanted to hear (but you couldn’t be bothered to dig your phone out and manually skip the track).
This is then taken and used to build your Discover Weekly playlist and create those Wrapped and Blend summaries. If something is skewing these recommendations – say, a bedtime playlist for your toddler or lofi hip hop for you, to help you catch some z’s once they’ve finally drifted off – you can exclude them from your Taste Profile, but so far it’s all a bit perfunctory.
It knows me so well?
The key limitation to all of this is that right now, you can only tell Spotify “no thank you” regarding certain tracks; you can’t directly offer notes on what you’d actually prefer – or why you think this song is AI-generated (and as a musician, you don’t like that), say.
In Spotify version 9.1.28.385, Android Authority has spotted code strings that mention a new and unreleased Notes feature linked to your Taste Profile.
As Android Authority reports, “The feature appears to let you add written feedback that helps ‘influence what you see on Home.’ One string reads, ‘Tell us more about you,’ while another clarifies, ‘Your notes help influence what you see on Home.’ There’s even an example placeholder text, ‘I’ve been listening to a lot of…’ that suggests the kind of free-form input Spotify may be aiming for.”
The report also claims that based on these strings, you should be able to edit, add, and/or delete previous notes linked to your Taste Profile – although Spotify does seem to be putting limits on the number of notes you can create and the number of characters per note (so no lengthy rants on early noughties folk rock? Got it).
Clearly, the upgrade is still being tested, but if it does make it to market (ie, to all Spotify Premium subscribers), it would surely give us access to a very welcome level of personalized music curation, and unlike many of Spotify’s perks, something no other music streaming service currently has.
The best noise cancelling headphones for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ReAfzgzxmuncoQnppksSGd-1547-80.jpg
Source link
becky.scarrott@futurenet.com (Becky Scarrott)
