Spotify has a ton of music — about 100 million songs, according to the latest publicly available data — which means there’s always new music to listen to. You could spend all your time listening to Spotify and never get close to the end of its massive catalog.
When you’re looking for something new, Spotify’s recommendation algorithm will guide you to music you’re most likely to like based on what you’ve liked before. You can tweak this algorithm in different ways to ensure it picks the best songs from among 100 million songs.
Make it private
Private listening is listening that Spotify doesn’t record and doesn’t count towards recommendations — it’s like opening an incognito window in your browser just to play a song.
If you like to listen to a bunch of movie soundtracks that your kids can sing along to in the car, or you’re checking out a band you’re not yet familiar with, you can enable Private Listening to prevent those hours and minutes from being recorded.
You can’t do this in the web player, but you can on desktop and the mobile app. On desktop, click on your profile picture (top right), Private Session; On mobile, house On the tab, tap your profile picture (top left), Privacy and Social To find out Private Session Toggle switch.
Please note that a Private Session can only be started from the device playing Spotify. If you restart the app, the Session will turn off again, and will automatically turn off after 6 hours.
Exclude Playlist
Maybe you have one or more specific playlists that you want Spotify to ignore when it comes to recommendations, such as a compilation of lo-fi jazz tunes that you like to listen to at work, but don’t need any related recommendations.
Maybe you’re creating a playlist for a friend’s party or wedding, but none of the songs suit your taste. Or maybe you want to listen to some Christmas-y tunes, but don’t want to listen to these artists for the rest of the year.
Whatever the reason, Spotify allows you to exclude certain playlists from influencing its recommendation algorithm. Just open the playlist on desktop or the web app, click the three dots, Exclude from the taste profile option.
If you’re using the Spotify mobile app, it’s pretty much the same: open any playlist on your screen, tap the three dots, Exclude from the taste profile. Songs in a playlist won’t be counted towards recommendations unless the song is also included in other playlists that you haven’t excluded.
Send us your feedback
Open the Spotify homepage on web, desktop, or mobile. You’ll see a variety of recommendations based on your listening and other activity on Spotify, including playlists, individual albums, artists, and more.
The mobile apps are different from the desktop and web apps in that you can let Spotify know when a particular recommendation doesn’t live up to your expectations. Just tap the three dots next to the recommended song to let it know. Not interested option.
Spotify’s algorithms will then record your disinterest and you should see fewer such recommendations in the future, though it’s hard to say exactly how much of an impact this particular action will have.
It’s worth using this option when Spotify tells you a song you don’t like on the mobile app, but it won’t show up in auto-generated playlists based on artists or genres you’ve previously listened to a lot.
Select a song
The opposite of telling Spotify that you’re not interested in a song is telling it that you’re very interested in a song, and there are a few ways to do this besides just keeping the song playing on a regular cycle.
On desktop, web, and mobile apps, you’ll see an icon next to each song that looks like a plus sign in a circle. This icon adds the song to your list of liked tracks, indicating that it’s one of your favorites.
Confusingly, if you see the same icon next to an album or playlist, that item will be added to your Spotify library, which is a curated section of the Spotify catalogue, and again, the recommendations you see are a reflection of your musical taste.
Of course, you can also add songs or albums to your custom playlists with the three dots next to them, a long press, or a right click. Adding songs to a playlist or two, rather than picking them from the Spotify catalogue, is another way to steer your recommendations in the right direction.
