I’m nervous that Spotify has made an AI echo chamber for music fans

My friends and I occasionally enjoy using the Spotify Blend feature, which creates a playlist for you and invited friends based on the songs and artists you've collectively been listening to.

The only issue is that this exposes your dreaded Taste Profile for your friends to see – and perhaps ridicule (in good faith, of course). And there wasn't a lot you could do about it.

Your Taste Profile, for the uninitiated, is far less appetising than it sounds, and is instead Spotify's interpretation of your musical likes and dislikes. It's the elusive algorithm that powers Spotify's famous personalised recommendations, and is a key method of music discovery for millions of Spotify subscribers.

It can cause an issue if anyone shares an account. I learnt this the hard way when I connected my Spotify to an Echo Dot in a shared kitchen, and had jump scares from musical theatre songs in my recommendations for months (nothing against musicals – I enjoy them, but not that much).

Previously, your Taste Profile had been rather rigid and difficult to directly influence. There are options to remove certain songs and playlists but this was a rather manual task – most of us have been playing the long game and praying Spotify realises that we don't want to hear Christmas songs in January.

Until now. Spotify announced last week that Premium subscribers will soon be able to edit their Taste Profile for the first time. Clicking on your profile will reveal a 'Taste Profile' section, which will explicitly reveal how Spotify defines your music taste. An AI-powered chat box then allows you to request changes directly.

This will, of course, be a godsend to parents everywhere whose recommendations are full of KPop Demon Hunters and Disney songs, as well as those who have spent years tactically liking and skipping songs in an effort to fine-tune their recommendations.

But this could potentially have a huge impact on the way music is discovered, marketed and listened to.

Spotify is by far the biggest music streaming service in the world with 751 million monthly active users, including 290 million Premium subscribers.

And it's no secret that the algorithm is one of the biggest ways people discover music now – gone are the days when we'd strike up conversations at record shops; streaming has made us antisocial.

As 100 billion streams will tell you, the average person's exposure to new music is increasingly at the mercy of Spotify's famous Discover Weekly and similar playlists.

These recommendations were already mini echo chambers, providing new songs but only in the confines of the genres we listened to most. And now it could get even worse, as users everywhere can explicitly dictate the specific sounds (tracks and artists) they like.

This could mean no long-shot recommendations, curveballs or suggestions based on other facets of your personality – just the same AI prompt for 'new tracks like the old ones', refreshed weekly for eternity.

Where does this leave emerging artists? It will surely only become even harder for new artists and more experimental sounds to cut through.

Artists could even be pressured to mould their music to the most popular Taste Profile prompts, whether that's actual genres or vibe-based music requests for commutes or running.

There are plenty of positives to streaming, not least the 100 million songs at our fingertips – we should be uncovering as many of them as we can, rather than relying on the algorithm to serve up the same old sounds.

MORE:

Spotify's new 'Exclusive Mode' gives you "bit-perfect" playback from the Windows desktop app

Down with Spotify! The streaming services that hate the streaming model

The best hi-res music streaming services around