Spotify just posted a monster quarter — 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion (about $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting story from its earnings call is co-CEO Gustav Söderström’s pitch: the rise of AI agents is not a threat to Spotify. It is a tailwind.
“Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age,” Söderström told investors. His logic: agents excel at replacing chores people would rather not do, but entertainment is the opposite — “nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them.” Instead of hunting through the app, listeners could just ask an AI assistant for running music, a podcast about a topic they have been discussing, or an audiobook recap that picks up where they left off.
Spotify Logo (Credits: TechCrunch)
Spotify wants to be the music service every AI agent chooses
Spotify’s goal is blunt: be the media service people use from any agent. It was the first music service to integrate with Meta’s Muse assistant, and it also plugs into 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,” Söderström said. Crucially, Spotify says it is not sending listener data to partners — the agent asks, and Spotify’s own systems reason about the request and choose what to play.
Why Spotify thinks agents will help, not hurt, music
Söderström describes Spotify as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or via another agent.” As an example: ask Spotify to go through your listening history back to 2008, pick your true favorites, beat-stretch them, sort by key and BPM, and mix them into a running playlist at your exact cadence. The market is already tense over agent access — Amazon has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform — but Söderström says Spotify is “leaning in and participating in the growth instead of standing by the roadside.”
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Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.