Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström believes artificial intelligence agents could become an advantage for music streaming, arguing that people want technology to handle everyday chores so they can spend more time enjoying entertainment.
“Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age,” Söderström said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on October 22. “People love getting rid of chores. But entertainment is the opposite. Nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them.”
Rather than treating AI agents as a threat, Spotify says it is building its service to work through them. The company has integrated with platforms including ChatGPT and Meta’s Muse, allowing users to interact with Spotify through external interfaces while the streaming service retains control over playback and music recommendations.
Söderström outlined how that could change playlist creation. A listener could ask Spotify to review their listening history dating back to 2008, identify favourite tracks, adjust their tempos and sort them by musical key and beats per minute before assembling a running playlist matched to their pace.
The co-CEO emphasized that Spotify would not hand over listeners’ personal data to these third-party platforms. Instead, external agents can request information, while Spotify uses its own data to determine what to play.
Spotify’s existing personalization features are already attracting users. Nearly 40 million Premium subscribers were using its Mixing Tools, which let listeners customize playlists, while its AI-powered “About the Song” feature was approaching 100 million users, according to Reuters.
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