Spotify Testing New Option To Turn Off Personalised Recommendations: What It Means

Music streaming platform Spotify its testing a new feature, which will allow users to turn off their personalised recommendations. It is means that songs played by other people using your account won’t affect your own music suggestions.

According a report from MacRumors, the new option could conceivably allow users to prevent songs played on their account on behalf of other listeners from affecting their personalised recommendations.

The step is likely to be welcomed by Spotify users who aren’t entirely satisfied with the success rate of the service’s algorithms in matching new songs to their listening tastes.

As per MacRumors, Spotify’s recommendation system combines a number of machine learning and AI-driven methods. The service’s algorithm analyses listening history, favorite genres, and the time of day that users listen to music, and bases its personal recommendations on these parameters.

This process is combined with content-based filtering, which analyses the audio of a song that a user interacts with, and takes into account characteristics like time signature, key, and tempo to recommend new songs with similar characteristics.

Spotify’s recommendation system relies on collaborative filtering, suggesting songs based on users with similar tastes.

“Yet, this can lead to recommending popular songs more frequently, creating an “echo chamber” effect. For new users without a listening history, this approach may not be very helpful,” MacRumors reported.

Spotify hasn’t specified when the ability to turn off personal recommendations will be available or if the trial is limited to specific regions.

The platform mentions it is “evaluating the feature” and expresses gratitude to users for trying it out to enhance the Spotify experience.

In related news, during its third quarter (Q3), Spotify experienced a 16 per cent year-on-year growth in its paid subscriber base, reaching a total of 226 million, as per the company’s recent announcement.

Net additions of 6 million paid users were 2 million ahead of the guidance, said the company.