Spotify now lets you exclude certain playlists from its recommendations

Spotify is rolling out a feature that will let you tell it to ignore music in certain playlists when it’s deciding what type of music you like. The feature is called Exclude From Your Taste Profile, and the company is pitching it as a way to keep your recommendations from getting overrun by “songs and artists that don’t fit” your general listening habits.

It’s easy to imagine several scenarios where this ability could be useful. Your sleep playlist could end up getting a lot of listen time but may not have the type of music or sounds you want to listen to while you’re awake. It’s a similar story with work playlists, which could be very different from your off-the-clock music tastes. (One of my co-workers commented that their lo-fi beats playlists “killed” their discover weekly when we were discussing this feature.)

Spotify also says it’ll be useful if you have kids — the feature will let you have a playlist with their music easily accessible without telling the algorithm that you’d love a ton of Kidz Bop or Pinkfong in your daily mix.

The company says you can exclude playlists using its iOS, Android, and desktop apps as well as its web player. To do so, select the playlist, tap the three dots button, and then tap the “Exclude from your taste profile” button. You may not have the feature immediately, though, as Spotify says it just started rolling out today.

This isn’t the first time Spotify has given users control over what does and doesn’t affect their algorithmic recommendations. If you turn on a Private Session, anything you listen to won’t color your Made For You playlists. While you could technically do that every time you wanted to listen to work or kids music, it’d be way more of a pain than just setting specific playlists to not affect your recommendations.