Spotify had a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly 5 billion euros (about $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from his 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 believes that the music streaming giant is particularly well suited to this shift.
“Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually thrives in the media age,” Söderström told investors. “This is because agents excel at replacing and taking care of things that people would rather not do. People like to get rid of work. 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 can ask an AI assistant to do the work for them. They might want music for a run, a podcast about something they discussed with an AI, or an audiobook recap that picks up exactly where they left off.
Spotify wants to be the service agents turn to for people to 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 by every agent, to really turn the growth of agents into a tail instead of a tailwind. That’s exactly what we see now. We see a really good adoption of Spotify in these agents. While other companies may be trying to figure out what to do and a lot hangs out, we actually hang in the growth and instead participate, said Söder.
The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents can access third-party services. Amazon, for example, blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, illustrating how big players can restrict external agents when questions about access, security, privacy or commercial control arise.
Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI should just make entertainment easier to find. It should also make the experience more personal.
Söderström describes Spotify today as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or through another agent… Spotify is now an agent that you can not only click on in our app, but talk to, ask questions and instruct.”
“For example, you can ask Spotify to go through your listening history song by song back to 2008, pick out your real favorites, strip them out by speeding them up or down, and then sort by key and BPM. Then you can ask it to mix them together into the perfect running playlist at your exact cadence,” Söderström explains.
Spotify has years of listening history to draw on, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip and the music they discover. This 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 does not send its listening 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.
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