Spotify’s new fix stops your kids from wrecking your recommendations

Anyone sharing a Spotify family plan knows the moment: Wrapped rolls around, and half your top tracks are songs your kid has played on repeat for months. Spotify says it's finally fixed that, rolling out a new toggle that strips kids' and family listening history out of your personal recommendations.

The setting lives in the app under account settings, and flipping it means a household's shared listening no longer bleeds into an individual's taste profile.

That fix extends across Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, and Wrapped, the three places family sing-alongs have historically done the most damage to personalised suggestions. 

Before the toggle is switched on, family listening still shapes recommendations by default, so users need to actively turn it off.

Unlike perks such as narrated magazine articles, this toggle isn't locked behind a premium subscription. Both free and paid users can access it at any time, a notable departure from Spotify's usual pattern of reserving new controls for paying customers.

In addition to launching the feature, Spotify is expanding managed accounts, giving children the ability to create their own individual music collections within the same account that parents manage.

The problem Spotify is trying to fix is not unique to its service. The streaming platform Deezer gives users the ability to remove specific songs or artists from the recommendation feed with the help of an unhappy-face icon where users can select "Don't recommend this track" or "Don't recommend this artist."

Alternatively, Amazon Music Unlimited gives families the ability to set up separate Alexa accounts so each member of the family receives customised suggestions from the service, although it needs some time to get to know the user's preferences.

The other services will still need you to have a multi-account family plan just to avoid listening history overlap.

The company is introducing the feature gradually to some users rather than all at once, which means it hasn’t yet been proven to work.

But since Spotify has always lagged behind others when it comes to audio quality, this quick fix to a nagging problem might be significant if it actually does work.