Spotify‘s third quarter was strong – 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion in revenue – but co-CEO Gustav Söderström used the earnings call to frame the company’s future around AI agents. His argument: agents are good at removing chores, and music listening is not a chore. People won’t ask an agent to ‘summarize a song’; they’ll ask it to find music for a run, play a podcast connected to a conversation, or resume an audiobook where they left off. Spotify‘s goal is to be the media service those agents call on, rather than forcing listeners into its own app.

Spotify has already integrated with Meta’s Muse, ChatGPT, and Claude, and Söderström says adoption inside those agents is strong. Other companies may be ‘leaning out’ of agent integrations while Spotify is ‘leaning in,’ hoping to turn agent growth from a headwind into a tailwind. The article notes that friction is possible: Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, an example of the access, privacy, and commercial-control disputes around agents reaching third-party services.

Söderström also described Spotify itself as an intelligent media service ‘encapsulated as an agent’: users can talk to it, ask questions, and issue instructions. He gave the example of asking Spotify to scan listening history back to 2008, pick true favorites, beat-stretch them, sort by key and BPM, and mix them into a running playlist at an exact cadence. Spotify‘s edge is years of listening history – artists revisited, skipped tracks, discoveries – which lets it reason about requests in-house. Importantly, Spotify says it does not send listener data to AI partners; an agent asks Spotify, and Spotify uses its own systems to choose what to play.