For years, the relationship between you and Spotify’s recommendations has felt a bit like dating: one accidental, dramatic listen to a guilty-pleasure jam and suddenly the app is convinced you’ve had a personality transplant. Today that ends — or at least, it gets a sensible second chance.

Spotify has rolled out a new control that lets listeners exclude individual tracks from their “Taste Profile,” the invisible scorecard Spotify uses to shape everything from your Home rows and Discover Weekly to Blend playlists and year-end Wrapped. The option is available globally to both Free and Premium users across web, desktop and mobile apps — so whether you’re on your phone, laptop, or the web player, you can tell Spotify, politely: “that one doesn’t count.”

Spotify’s Taste Profile is the algorithmic shorthand for “what Spotify thinks you like.” It’s built from what you play, how you interact with tracks (skips, saves, repeats), and other signals. Those signals feed a bunch of visible features: personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, the songs that pop up on your Home screen, friend Blends, and the narratives Spotify stitches together for Wrapped. That level of influence is convenient most of the time — but deeply annoying when a one-off listen (a toddler’s lullaby, a meme track, a late-night guilty pleasure) warps your future suggestions.

Before today, Spotify did offer some ways to blunt the noise — you could exclude whole playlists from your Taste Profile, use Private Sessions, or explicitly hide artists — but those were blunt instruments. Blocking a whole playlist or firing up private listening works, but they’re unwieldy for the small, specific problems people actually have. The new track-level exclusion gives listeners the granularity to remove the single offending earworm without banning an entire playlist or changing their listening habits.

How to use it (spoiler: it’s simple)

Open a track (or a playlist), tap the three-dot menu, and choose “Exclude from your Taste Profile.” You can reverse the decision later by selecting “Include in your Taste Profile.” Spotify says excluding a track lessens the impact of both past and future plays of that song on your recommendations; the change generally takes effect within about 48 hours, although some recommendations (like a weekly mix) might not reflect it until the following refresh cycle.

A couple of practical notes: excluding a track doesn’t remove it from your library, it doesn’t stop you from playing it manually, and it doesn’t delete your history — it simply tells Spotify to treat that track as less informative when constructing your Taste Profile. In other words, you can still jam out to that guilty pleasure; it just won’t scream “new identity” to the algorithm.

This isn’t Spotify inventing the idea — the company has been experimenting with playlist-exclusion tools for a while, and engineering posts from previous years show the product team wrestling with exactly how much to discount excluded content without creating unintended side effects. The practical trade-offs are obvious: exclude too aggressively and the algorithm becomes blind to legitimate signals; exclude too little and the feature is meaningless. Spotify’s rollout suggests the company thinks it has found a workable balance.

A few limitations are worth calling out. Excluding a track doesn’t mean Spotify will never show it to you in any context — editorial placements, shared playlists, or explicit follows can still surface it. And operationally, Spotify’s support notes that exclusions take some time to propagate through recommendation systems, so don’t expect an instant rewrite of every playlist. Finally, this feature is about personalization control, not privacy: it changes how your tastes are summarized internally, but it doesn’t erase listening records or billing data.