Spotify Bets Big on AI Agents as Monthly Users Climb to 788 Million
Spotify delivered a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and bringing in nearly €5 billion in revenue, or about $5.6 billion. While those numbers show the company’s continued growth, the bigger story from its latest earnings discussion is how Spotify plans to shape the future of music streaming in the age of AI agents.
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström believes the company is in a strong position as artificial intelligence becomes a bigger part of everyday digital life. In his view, AI agents are best at handling tasks people do not want to spend time on, such as organizing, searching, or managing repetitive activities. Entertainment, however, is different. People do not want an AI to replace the experience of enjoying a song, podcast, or audiobook. They want help finding the right content faster.
That difference could work in Spotify’s favor.
Instead of manually opening the Spotify app, searching for artists, browsing playlists, or deciding what to listen to next, users may increasingly ask an AI assistant to handle the process. A listener could request upbeat music for a morning run, a podcast related to a recent conversation, or an audiobook that continues from the exact point where they stopped. Spotify wants to become the service those AI assistants rely on when users ask for audio entertainment.
The company has already started moving in that direction. Spotify has integrated with major AI assistants, including Meta’s Muse, ChatGPT, and Claude. By doing so, Spotify is positioning itself not just as a standalone app, but as a music and audio platform that can be accessed through conversational AI.
Söderström told investors that Spotify’s goal is to become the media service people use through any AI agent. Rather than treating AI assistants as a threat, Spotify sees them as a new path for growth. If users begin asking AI tools to play music, recommend podcasts, or build playlists, Spotify wants to be the platform powering those requests.
This strategy comes at a time when the relationship between AI agents and third-party platforms is becoming more complicated. Some major companies are already limiting how outside AI assistants interact with their services, raising concerns around privacy, security, user access, and business control. Spotify, however, appears to be taking the opposite approach by welcoming AI-driven discovery while still maintaining control over its own data and recommendation systems.
A key part of Spotify’s pitch is personalization. The company does not simply want AI to make audio easier to find. It wants AI to make listening more relevant to each person.
Spotify has an advantage because it has years of user listening history. It knows which artists people replay, which songs they skip, what genres they explore, and how their tastes change over time. That gives Spotify a deeper understanding of personal listening habits than a generic AI assistant would have on its own.
Söderström described Spotify as an intelligent media service that can act like an agent itself. Users can already interact with Spotify through clicks and searches, but the company sees a future where people can talk to Spotify, ask it questions, and give it detailed instructions.
For example, a user could ask Spotify to review their listening history going back years, identify their true favorite songs, adjust the tempo, organize tracks by key and beats per minute, and create a seamless running playlist that matches their exact pace. That type of deeply personalized playlist would be difficult for a general AI assistant to create without access to Spotify’s listening intelligence.
At the same time, Spotify says it is not handing over user listening data to its AI partners. According to Söderström, outside agents can send requests to Spotify, but Spotify processes those requests through its own systems. In other words, the AI assistant may ask for a playlist or recommendation, but Spotify decides what content best matches the listener’s needs.
This approach could help Spotify balance convenience with privacy. Users get the benefit of conversational AI, while Spotify keeps control over its recommendation engine and user data.
The company’s AI strategy also reflects a broader shift in how people may interact with apps in the future. Instead of opening individual apps for every task, users may rely on AI agents as a central interface. They might ask one assistant to book travel, summarize emails, schedule meetings, and play music. For Spotify, the challenge is making sure it remains the default choice whenever someone asks for audio entertainment.
With hundreds of millions of active users, strong revenue, and a growing presence inside AI assistants, Spotify is trying to turn the rise of AI agents into an opportunity rather than a disruption. The company believes people will still want music, podcasts, and audiobooks as much as ever. What may change is how they ask for them.
If Spotify succeeds, the future of music streaming may feel less like searching through menus and more like having a conversation. Users could describe a mood, moment, memory, workout, or idea, and Spotify would instantly build the right listening experience around it. For a company built on personalization, AI agents may become the next major step in how people discover and enjoy audio.
