Spotify is giving listeners more control over its Home screen, rolling out three new controls worldwide on mobile that let users hide the tiles at the top of the feed, remove individual items from Recents and ask for fewer episodes from specific shows or authors.

The update, announced on 12 November, applies to both Free and Premium accounts in every market, and arrives in the mobile app. Listeners need the latest version of the app to see the new options.

Three ways to tidy Home

The first control targets the row of music, podcast and audiobook tiles pinned to the top of Home. Until now those shortcuts were fixed in place; users can now remove them and clear space for the feed below.

The second covers the Recents shelf. Instead of living with everything played recently, listeners can delete single items from the list, removing a one-off listen or a shared device's choices without clearing the whole history.

The third widens Spotify's "Not interested" option. It now covers specific shows and authors, so a listener can tell the app to play fewer episodes from a particular podcast or fewer books from a particular author. Spotify describes the change as housekeeping: it tidies the screen rather than changing what the app recommends later.

Part of a week of listener controls

The Home changes are the second Spotify control update in a week. On 10 November the company added nine voices to its AI DJ feature, including seven English-language voices with American, British, Irish, Australian and Indian accents and two Spanish-language options, and gave Premium subscribers the option to switch off the DJ's spoken commentary between songs.

Spotify says 80 percent of listeners who use the DJ feature return to it every week, which helps explain why the company is investing in giving them more say over how it sounds and looks. The DJ update began rolling out on 10 November in markets where the feature is already available.

Why Spotify is handing over control

The changes land as Spotify's audience keeps growing. In its third-quarter update on 22 October, the company reported 306 million Premium subscribers and 788 million monthly active users, a scale at which small frustrations with the Home feed affect hundreds of millions of people.

They also come alongside Spotify's audiobook expansion. The company's Audiobooks+ add-on, which gives subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening per billing cycle, launched in the United Arab Emirates on 12 November at AED 29.99 a month, as part of a global expansion announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October that will take audiobooks from 22 markets to more than 180 by the end of 2026.

For listeners, the practical advice is simple: update the app, then look for the new options on Home. The rollout is gradual, so the controls may not appear for every eligible account at the same moment.

Source: TechProlonged; see also Technobezz.