The Discover Weekly playlist is one of my favorite Spotify features—but I can’t pretend it’s always spot on. Old music tastes locked into the algorithm can easily upset the week, and that’s without getting into the absolute curveball oddities sometimes served up.
So, while I love Spotify Discover Weekly, these are the changes I’d like to see to make it even better.
5
Some User Input—Just a Little
Part of the wonder of Spotify’s Discover Weekly is that it pulls from your listening taste profile to create a unique playlist packed with new music.
For me, it means a weekly dose of new music that often hits the spot, and I’ll typically add a few tracks to my existing go-to playlists, and maybe favorite one or two. However, there are some weeks when the option to steer the Discover Weekly playlist in a certain direction would be welcome.
Now, in fairness, Spotify is experimenting with this at the time of writing. Spotify’s June 2025 Discover Weekly update introduced the idea of tweaking your playlist.
You’ll also now see a list of five genres above the songs, allowing you to tweak the playlist more to your liking. Essentially, this means you now have six distinct Discover Weekly playlists to explore each week. Which will be (literal) music to the ears of fans of the feature.
It’s a good start. But I’d like to push that one step further and have the option to add mood filters to this, too, like “chill,” “euphoric,” “studying,” and so on. And how about an era toggle for those weeks where you want to hear something new from, say, the 70s that you’ve never heard before?
Another interesting way Spotify could implement this is with a selection of randomized options relating to your algorithm. Instead of a set list of six core genres, it adds six randomized options that throw up something new. Or, how about a weight slider that pushes your algorithm to artists with fewer than a certain number of monthly listeners or similar.
As said, Spotify is experimenting with this feature already, which I’m really happy to see.
4
Why Is This Track on My Discover Weekly?
One feature that I’d like to see is how Spotify decides what music it’s serving up to you each week.
The Spotify Discover Weekly algorithm, like much of Spotify’s other algorithmically-generated playlists, is a black box. It’s great when your Discover Weekly playlist appears, but it would be wonderful to know why some of the tracks were chosen.
Discover Weekly uses a range of different signals to populate your playlist: implicit behavior, playlist graphs and groupings, global listening history and links, collaborative filtering, and so on.
However, it would be great if you could hover over a track and see a little information on why it was selected—the strongest signal that pushed it onto your list.
3
Easier Options to Remove Genres From the Taste Profile
Your Spotify Taste Profile is what guides your Discover Weekly playlist. It’s an evolving set of data that Spotify uses to serve up new music to you, taking in every decision you make to better refine it choices.
How well the Taste Profile works depends on your listening preferences. Spend a week listening to dubstep, and your Discover Weekly is likely to assume you’re keen to hear more. But we’ve all been there: that brief stint listening to obscure Brazilian hip-hop was fun, but it was just a phase.
So, having the option to remove specific genres from your Taste Profile would be great.
It’s very much worth pointing out that this functionality exists in Spotify. The Exclude from your taste profile button is available on most Spotify playlists. Before you begin playing the niche flavor of the week, select this option, and Spotify will ignore it. It works—but you have to remember to do this for each playlist you switch to. And, I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t always consider that I don’t want this in my Taste Profile.
The option to remove certain genres, songs, and styles from your Discover Weekly would be another welcome addition.
2
Show My Past Discover Weekly Playlists
Your Spotify Discover Weekly is a one-off playlist, generated each week. If you want to keep a particular week, you have to create a new playlist with all of the songs on it. It’s not a taxing process; creating a Spotify playlist is easily done.
But it would be fantastic if there were an option to return to old Discover Weekly playlists. You could see the songs that you liked earlier in the month or year, building a small personal archive of your unique Discover Weekly playlists.
1
Let Me Rate It
You can run down your Spotify Discover Weekly playlist and add them to your Liked Songs list. But the option to give the whole of the Discover Weekly playlist a proper rating would be a handy way to provide specific feedback to Spotify on what it served up that week.
The introduction of a weekly rating would help to guide Spotify and improve your playlists each week.
I’d be slightly concerned that Spotify would interpret this as a message to focus on specific genres repeatedly, but it’s another way for listeners to signal their approval (or not).
