The single most useful thing to understand about Discover Weekly is that it is a mirror, not a menu. You do not pick what goes in it. You feed it, and it hands you back a version of what you have been playing, filtered through the taste of thousands of listeners who overlap with you. So if you want a better playlist next Monday, you do not change a setting. You change your behavior this week, and you wait for it to catch up.

That is the whole game. Everything below is just the specific moves that work, and the one thing people keep trying that does not.

If you want the full picture of how Discover Weekly is actually built (the collaborative filtering, the audio analysis, why it refreshes on Monday), that is the pillar page. This one is purely about steering it.

Like and save the songs you want more of

When a track in Discover Weekly lands, hit the heart. Save it to your library. This is the clearest signal you can send, and Spotify says so directly: in its own advice on personalizing the playlist, "hearting" a song and adding it to your own playlists both tell the algorithm you want more like this. A save is a stronger vote than a passive listen.

The reverse matters just as much. If a song is not for you, do not just let it play out politely. Skip it early, in the first few seconds, and if you really do not want anything like it, use the hide option. On mobile you can tap the three dots on a track and choose "Hide song," or long-press it. A quick skip and a full listen read very differently to the algorithm. One says "no," the other says "more of this."

Think of every heart, save, skip, and hide as a small correction to the steering wheel. None of them does much alone, but a week of them adds up to a noticeably different playlist.

Improving Discover Weekly starts with knowing what Spotify already thinks you like. Music Profile Viewer shows your top artists, top tracks, and recently played across the last 4 weeks, 6 months, and all time. It uses Spotify's official read-only login and stores nothing. Free, no signup.

Listen to full tracks, not ten-second samples

Half-listening is the quietest way to sabotage your recommendations. If you habitually skip through songs after a few seconds, sample-hunting, you are telling Spotify that almost nothing satisfies you. The algorithm leans on how long and how completely you play things. A song you let run to the end, or come back to, counts far more than one you bounced off in three seconds.

This is also why brand-new accounts get thin, repetitive Discover Weeklys. There is not enough real listening yet to compare you against anyone, and no trick shortcuts it. You just have to use the app like a person who is actually enjoying music, and give it a few weeks of honest history.

Branch into new artists and genres on purpose

Here is the move most people miss. If your Discover Weekly feels stale or stuck in one lane, it is usually because your listening got narrow. Play the same three albums on repeat and the algorithm has nowhere new to take you. It keeps drawing from the same tiny pool.

To shift it, listen wide on purpose. Spend a week digging into a genre you rarely touch. Play full albums from artists you have heard of but never explored. Follow a few of them, because following is another signal Spotify uses to pull in adjacent recommendations. New inputs give the algorithm new places to go, and that is exactly what shows up two Mondays later.

This is the real answer to "how do I change my Discover Weekly genre." You do not set the genre. You demonstrate it. Want more jazz in the mix? Go listen to a lot of jazz, all the way through, and heart what you like. The playlist follows your feet.

On the Spotify Community, people who complained their Discover Weekly got locked onto one genre often found it corrected itself. As one user put it after a rough week, "it's the next week and my discover weekly seems back to normal." Sometimes that is the algorithm settling on its own. More often it is because their listening drifted back to normal too.

Use Private Session for one-off binges

This is the tactic that saves your recommendations from your own life. Spotify builds Discover Weekly from what you play, and it cannot tell the difference between "this is my taste" and "I am putting on 40 minutes of nursery rhymes for a toddler." It all counts the same, unless you tell it otherwise.

That is what Private Session is for. Turn it on before a listening session you do not want feeding your profile: holiday music in December, a kid's playlist in the car, your partner's death-metal phase playing through your account, the podcast you fell asleep to. Music played in a Private Session does not affect your recommendations. You get to have the one-off binge without polluting next Monday's list.

To turn it on: on mobile, go to Settings and look under the Social section for Private Session, or tap it from your profile. On desktop, click your profile name in the top right and toggle "Private session." It switches itself off after about six hours or when you restart the app, so it is meant for temporary use, not as a permanent setting.

One caution, and it is the flip side of the same coin: if you leave Private Session on all the time, Spotify gets none of your real listening, and Discover Weekly goes stale for a completely different reason. Use it as a scalpel, not a blanket. If your playlist has gone flat and you cannot figure out why, a Private Session you forgot to turn off is one of the first things worth checking in the fixes for a stuck or stale playlist.

There is also a more permanent version of the same idea. Right-click a playlist (or open its menu) and look for "Exclude from your taste profile." That is the right tool for a playlist you keep but do not want shaping your recommendations, like a white-noise mix or the party playlist that is not really you.

Build playlists of the vibe you want

Adding songs to your own playlists is one of the stronger signals you can send, stronger than a single play. Spotify treats the music you deliberately collect as a real statement of taste. So if there is a mood or sound you want more of, build a playlist around it and actually listen to it. You are not just organizing music. You are drawing the algorithm a map of where you want to go.

This works best when the playlist is honest. A grab-bag of everything tells Spotify nothing. A focused playlist, late-night electronic or mellow acoustic or whatever the vibe is, gives it a clear direction to pull from.

Then give it a week to re-learn

None of this is instant. Discover Weekly regenerates once a week, overnight into Monday in your local time, and it overwrites the previous list completely. Whatever you do today shows up in next Monday's playlist at the earliest, and a real shift in taste can take two or three weeks to fully register. So do the work, then leave it alone. Checking obsessively on a Wednesday will not make it move. It sits still for six days by design.

Patience is part of the method. People give up after one disappointing Monday, right when their new listening is about to pay off.

The genre myth: what you can and cannot control

Let's kill the most common misconception directly. You cannot hand-pick the genre of your Discover Weekly. There is no dropdown, no "give me indie this week" button, no genre selector hiding in the settings. This is one of the most-requested features on the Spotify Community, with an open idea thread specifically asking Spotify to let people choose a mixed-genre Discover Weekly, and it has not shipped. The playlist is fully algorithmic and generated from your behavior, full stop.

So here is the honest split.

What you can control:

What you cannot control:

Once that clicks, the frustration mostly goes away. You are not fighting a broken feature. You are training a system that only speaks one language: what you actually listen to.

Start by seeing what Spotify already thinks

Before you try to fix your recommendations, it helps to know what you are working with. Discover Weekly is built from what you actually listen to, so the useful first question is: what does Spotify currently think my taste is? Sometimes the answer is surprising, quietly shaped by a road-trip playlist, a partner sharing your account, or three months of the same album on loop.

You can see your top artists and tracks on Music Profile Viewer, free and with no signup. Look at the top artists across a few time ranges. If that list looks nothing like the music you actually want more of, that gap is exactly why Discover Weekly feels wrong, and now you know precisely what to feed it this week.