Spotify reported a strong third quarter, with 788 million monthly active users and revenue of nearly €5 billion, or about $5.6 billion. Yet the part of the earnings call that drew the most attention concerned something less tangible: how people may listen to music in the years ahead, and why AI agents could work in the company's favor.
Co-CEO Gustav Söderström told investors that Spotify is "in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age." His reasoning was that agents are good at taking over tasks people would rather avoid. "People love getting rid of chores. But entertainment is the opposite. Nobody asks an agent to 'summarize a song' for them," he said.
Under this model, a listener would not necessarily open the Spotify app, look up an artist and assemble a playlist by hand. They could instead ask an AI assistant to handle it. Examples include music for a run, a podcast related to a topic the person has been discussing with an AI, or an audiobook recap that resumes at the exact point they stopped.
Spotify wants to be the service those agents call on. It was the first music service to integrate with Meta's Muse assistant, and it also works with ChatGPT and Claude. Söderström said the aim is for Spotify to be "the media service that you use from any agent, really turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind." He said adoption inside these agents has been strong, and contrasted Spotify's stance with that of other companies that are "leaning out" while it is "leaning in."
Not every company is welcoming outside agents. Amazon, for instance, has blocked Meta's Muse from shopping on its platform, a sign that large players may restrict third-party agents over concerns about access, security, privacy or commercial control.
Spotify's argument goes beyond convenience. Söderström described the company as "an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent," one that users can click in the app, but also talk to, question and instruct, whether directly or through another agent. As an example, he said a user could ask Spotify to comb through their listening history back to 2008 song by song, pick their true favorites, speed up or slow down the tracks, sort them by key and BPM, and blend them into a running playlist matched to their cadence.
The company's years of data on listeners, including the artists they return to, the songs they skip and the music they discover, is meant to make its recommendations feel more personal than a generic playlist from an assistant that knows little about someone's tastes.
Söderström also stressed that Spotify is not passing listener data to its partners. In his description, the agent makes a request to Spotify, and Spotify then uses its own systems to reason about it and decide what to play.
