Spotify's co-CEO Gustav Söderström has told investors that the rise of AI assistants could work in the music streaming company's favour. Speaking during the earnings call for a third quarter in which Spotify reported 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion in revenue, or about $5.6 billion, he argued that Spotify is well placed for what he called the agentic age. The core of the strategy is simple: Spotify wants to be the service that AI agents turn to when someone asks for music.
A bet on being the service agents choose
Söderström said agents are good at taking over chores people would rather not do, while entertainment works the other way round. Nobody, he said, asks an agent to summarise a song. Listeners could instead ask an assistant for music for a run, a podcast linked to a subject they discussed with it, or an audiobook recap that picks up where they stopped.
Spotify was, according to Söderström, the first music service to integrate with Meta's Muse assistant, and it also works with ChatGPT and Claude. He said adoption of Spotify inside these agents is strong. He contrasted the company's approach with rivals that are still deciding how to respond, saying Spotify is "leaning in" rather than watching from the side.
Personal listening and listener data
Söderström described Spotify as an agent that users can question and instruct, not only a service they open in an app. He gave an example of a request to go through a listening history back to 2008, pick out favourites, adjust tempo and key, and mix them into a running playlist. Spotify has years of listening records, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip and the music they discover, which the company can use to make recommendations feel personal.
Söderström also stressed that Spotify does not send listener data to its partners. When an outside agent asks for something, the request goes to Spotify, and Spotify's own systems decide what to play.
Friction over access to third-party services
How agents reach outside services is becoming a point of dispute. Reports say Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse from shopping on its platform, an example of how large platforms may restrict outside agents over questions of access, security, privacy or commercial control. Spotify's plan depends on being welcomed inside other companies' assistants, so decisions like this one matter to its strategy.
What happens next will depend on whether more assistants open their platforms to services such as Spotify, and on how often listeners choose to start their music from an agent rather than an app.
Aasan alfaaz mein
Spotify ke co-CEO Gustav Söderström ke mutabiq AI agents, yani woh assistants jo kaam aap ke liye karti hain, Spotify ke liye faida mand ho sakti hain. Spotify chahta hai ke log ChatGPT, Claude ya Meta ke Muse jaise assistants ke zariye bhi gaane dhoondein aur playlist banayein. Aam listener ke liye iska matlab hai ke music dhoondhna aur playlist banana baatcheet ke zariye ho sakta hai. Spotify ka kehna hai ke woh listener ka data partners ko nahi bhejti.
