Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose
Spotify had a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly €5 billion (around $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from its earnings call was how the company sees people listening to music in the future, and why the rise of AI agents could be good news for its business.
Co-CEO Gustav Söderström thinks the music streaming giant is particularly well suited to this shift.
“Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age,” Söderström tells investors. “This is because agents excel at replacing and taking care of things people would rather not do. People love getting rid of chores. But entertainment is the opposite. Nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them.”
Instead of opening Spotify, searching for an artist and building a playlist themselves, listeners could ask an AI assistant to do the work for them. They might want music for a run, a podcast about something they’ve been discussing with an AI, or an audiobook recap that picks up exactly where they left off.
Spotify wants to be the service those agents turn to, letting people discover music and interact with Spotify through conversations rather than just its own app. Notably, Spotify was the first music service to integrate with Meta’s Muse assistant, and it also integrates with ChatGPT and Claude.
“Our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent, really turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind. That is exactly what we are seeing now. We are seeing really good adoption of Spotify inside these agents. While other companies are maybe trying to figure out what to do and many are leaning out, we are actually leaning in and participating in the growth instead of standing by the roadside and looking at it,” said Söderström.
The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents access third-party services. Amazon, for example, has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, illustrating how major players may restrict outside agents when questions arise around access, security, privacy, or commercial control.
Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI shouldn’t just make entertainment easier to find. It should make the experience more personal, too.
Söderström describes Spotify today as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or via another agent…Spotify is now an agent that you can not only click on in our app, but talk to, ask questions of, and instruct. We can do things today that no other media services can do,” he said.
“For example, you can ask Spotify to go through your listening history song by song back to 2008, picking your true favorites, beat-stretching them by speeding them up or down, and then sorting them by key and BPM. Then you can ask it to mix them together into the perfect running playlist at your exact cadence,” Söderström explained.
Spotify has years of listening history to draw on, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip, and the music they discover. That information can help it make recommendations that feel more personal than a generic playlist generated by an AI assistant that doesn’t know much about someone’s tastes.
However, Söderström also emphasized that Spotify isn’t sending its listener data to partners. Instead, the agent asks Spotify for something, and Spotify uses its own systems to reason about the request and choose what to play.