Spotify reported 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion in revenue for the third quarter. The earnings call highlighted a different priority: positioning the service as the preferred destination for AI agents.
Why agents care about music
Gustav Söderström, co-CEO, told investors the company is built for this shift. Agents excel at handling chores people dislike. Entertainment is the opposite. No one asks an assistant to summarise a song.
Instead, users will ask an AI to handle the work. They might request music for a run, a podcast linked to a previous discussion with an AI, or an audiobook recap that continues from the last stop.
Spotify aims to be the service agents turn to. Discovery and interaction will happen through conversation rather than just the app. The company was the first music service to integrate with Meta’s Muse assistant and also connects with ChatGPT and Claude.
Our goal is to be the media service you use from any agent. We want to turn 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, Söderström said.
Market friction
The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents access third-party services. Amazon has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform. This illustrates how major players may restrict outside agents when questions arise around access, security, privacy, or commercial control.
What it means for listeners
Spotify’s pitch is that AI should make the experience more personal, not just easier to find.
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. It will pick 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. This includes 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 does not know much about someone’s tastes.
Söderström also emphasised that Spotify is not sending its listener data to partners. Instead, the agent asks Spotify for something. Spotify uses its own systems to reason about the request and choose what to play.
