Spotify had a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly €5 billion (around $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from its 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 thinks the music streaming giant is particularly well-suited to this shift.
People love getting rid of chores. 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 could ask an AI assistant to do the work for them.
They might want music for a run, a podcast about something they’ve been discussing with an AI, or an audiobook recap that picks up exactly where they left off. Spotify wants to be the service those agents turn to, letting people 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.
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,” said Söderström.
The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents access third-party services. Amazon, for example, has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, illustrating how major players may restrict outside agents when questions arise around access, security, privacy, or commercial control. Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI should just make entertainment easier to find.
It should make the experience more personal, too. 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.
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