There’s a huge amount of music on Spotify – around 100 million tracks according to newly released figures – which means there’s always something new to listen to. Even if you spent all your time listening to Spotify, you wouldn’t be able to listen to its vast catalog.
When looking for new music, Spotify’s recommendation algorithm guides you to the music you’re most likely to like based on music you’ve liked before. You can tweak the algorithm in a variety of ways to ensure it gives you the best choices from those 100 million songs.
Privatization
Private listening is listening that is not recorded on your Spotify album. This doesn’t count towards your recommendations: it’s like opening an incognito window in your browser just for playing the song.
If your kids want to play a lot of feature-length movie soundtrack songs in the car, or you’re checking out a band you’re still not sure about, you can enable private listening and make sure those minutes and hours don’t get recorded.
You can’t do this on the web player, but you can on the desktop and mobile apps. On desktop, click your profile picture (top right corner) and then private meeting;On a mobile device, open Home tab, click your profile photo (top left corner) and select privacy and social turn up private meeting Flip the switch.
Please note that private sessions can only be started from the device where you are playing Spotify. If you restart the application, the session will close again and automatically close after six hours.
Exclude playlist
You might want Spotify to ignore one or more specific playlists in terms of recommendations: it might be a collection of lo-fi jazz songs that you like to listen to but don’t want any recommendations about.
Maybe you’re putting together a playlist for a friend’s party or wedding but none of the songs really hit your mark, or maybe you want to stick with some Christmas music but don’t want to hear any more from these artists for the rest of the year work.
Regardless of the reason, Spotify lets you exclude specific playlists so they don’t affect the recommendation algorithm. Open a playlist on desktop and web apps, then click the three dots to find Exclude from your flavor profile options.
If you use the Spotify mobile app, it’s very similar: open any playlist on your screen, tap the three dots, and select Exclude from your flavor profile. Any songs in a playlist won’t count towards your recommendations unless they happen to be in another playlist you haven’t excluded.
provide feedback
Open the Spotify homepage on the web, desktop, or mobile device. You’ll see a bunch of recommendations appear: playlists, individual albums, artists, and more, all based on your listening and other activity on Spotify.
The mobile app differs from the desktop and web apps in that it lets you tell Spotify when a specific recommendation doesn’t live up to your expectations. Click the three dots next to recommended content to access it not interested options.
The Spotify algorithm will then register your disinterest, and you should see fewer such recommendations in the future—although it’s hard to say exactly how influential this particular action will be.
Even though the option won’t appear in automatically generated playlists based on artists and genres you’ve listened to frequently before, it’s still worth using when Spotify tells you something you don’t like in the mobile app.
Select song
The flip side of telling Spotify you’re not interested in a song is telling it you’re very interested in a song — and there are a few different ways to do this besides just letting the song play in constant rotation.
On desktop, web, and mobile apps, you’ll see an icon next to individual songs that looks like a plus sign inside a circle. This icon adds a song to your Liked track list, indicating that it is one of your favorites.
Confusingly, when you see the same icon next to an album or playlist, it adds the item to your Spotify library. This is a carefully curated section of your Spotify catalog, and it’s a sign of your musical taste that’s integrated into the recommendations you see.
Of course, songs and albums can also be added to your custom playlist through the three dots next to them, long press or right click. Putting tracks into a playlist or two, rather than just picking them from the Spotify catalog, is another way to nudge your recommendations in the right direction.
