Spotify wants to be built into other companies' AI agents
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Spotify has redesigned itself under the hood as an agent so that ChatGPT, Muse and other AI assistants can work it with no effort. Söderström maintains that the music keeps playing on Spotify, that it does not give those partners its users' information and that it will be the last subscription people cancel. The company ended the third quarter with 306 million Premium subscribers and 788 million active users a month.
Spotify wants to be the music, podcast and audiobook service people use from any AI agent. Gustav Söderström, one of its two co-chief executives (the other is Alex Norström), set this out on Thursday, October 22, when the company presented its results for the third quarter of 2026.
According to the transcript of the analyst call published by The Motley Fool, Söderström recalled that nearly a decade ago Spotify rebuilt its technology so it could be easily integrated into connected speakers, TVs and consoles, and that it has now done the same with agents: Spotify has been remade as an agent so other agents find it very easy to integrate and talk to it directly. He noted that Spotify was the first service available in ChatGPT, that the same happened with Meta Ray-Ban glasses, and that it was the only media service built into Muse, Meta's AI agent, when it launched.
Analysts Jessica Reif Ehrlich and Rich Greenfield asked whether agents could turn Spotify into a mere background supplier, easy to swap for another. Söderström replied that listening is not moving anywhere else: the user talks to the agent, which controls Spotify in the background, and Spotify does not pass the music or the data to those partners. As he explained it, the agent makes a request and Spotify decides what to play. He gave the example that inside Muse a user can ask for a podcast on a topic, and that podcast is published on Spotify, visible only to that person. He compared it with the app's long-standing presence in Google Maps and Waze, which he said has helped it grow.
Greenfield also raised the point that an agent can compare prices or cancel subscriptions that go unused. Söderström answered that Spotify does not count on people forgetting they pay, that more than 100 million users open it 28 days a month, and he called it "a bold bet", but he believes Spotify will be the last thing people unsubscribe from.
"Nobody asks an agent to 'summarize a song' for them," he said in the results release. For Söderström, agents are there to take tedious chores off people's hands, such as paying bills or answering emails, and that leaves more time for entertainment.
Söderström added that tens of millions of people already talk to Spotify through its AI features and that the About the Song feature is heading for 100 million users. He gave no figures for how much listening already arrives from other companies' agents. In the quarter, Spotify reached 306 million Premium subscribers, up 9% on a year earlier, and 788 million monthly active users, up 11%.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Spotify's answer captures a doubt that affects any consumer service: if the customer talks to an agent rather than the app, whoever controls that conversation may end up owning the relationship and what is known about the customer. Spotify is trying to get ahead by integrating before anyone else and keeping the reasoning about each person's taste to itself, just as it did with connected speakers. It remains to be seen whether the owners of the agents will accept that split once they have more bargaining power, and the company has not said how much listening already comes that way. For anyone selling subscriptions, the lesson is uncomfortable: an agent that goes through spending rewards what is really used and punishes what is paid for out of forgetfulness.
Official source: Spotify · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
