Spotify Seeks to Become the Music Service AI Agents Turn To

Spotify is positioning itself as the music service AI assistants call when users want audio, a strategy that could turn agent adoption into another way for listeners to reach its catalog. The company wants people to start music requests in an outside assistant while Spotify’s systems interpret the prompt and decide what to play.

At its third-quarter earnings call, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström described the ambition as making the service available through any agent. “Our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent,” he said. Söderström argued that AI is useful for tasks people would rather avoid, while entertainment remains something they want to experience themselves.

Spotify already has integrations with Meta’s Muse, ChatGPT and Claude. The wider idea is to make audio discovery conversational: a listener might ask an assistant for music suited to a run, a podcast related to a topic under discussion or an audiobook recap that resumes where the listener stopped. Such requests shift some of the searching and organizing from the listener to the assistant.

The arrangements also define a division of work. A partner assistant sends the request, while Spotify processes it with its own systems and selects the audio. Söderström said the company does not give partner agents access to listener data. Spotify can use its own listening history to personalize a selection without giving that history to the assistant.

That history can cover years of behavior, including which artists listeners return to, which tracks they skip and which music they discover. Söderström described a use case in which Spotify reviews a listener’s past favorites reaching back to 2008, changes song speed, sorts the tracks by key and beats per minute, then mixes them into a running playlist matched to the person’s cadence. The example shows how a listener’s history can shape a request beyond a simple genre prompt.

Spotify ended the third quarter with 788 million monthly active users. Söderström’s pitch is that people can delegate finding and arranging music while Spotify handles personalized selections based on their listening patterns.