Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose

Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI should just make entertainment easier to find. It should make the experience more personal, too.  

Söderström describes Spotify today as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or via another agent…Spotify is now an agent that you can not only click on in our app, but talk to, ask questions of, and instruct. We can do things today that no other media services can do,” he said.

“For example, you can ask Spotify to go through your listening history song by song back to 2008, picking your true favorites, beat-stretching them by speeding them up or down, and then sorting them by key and BPM. Then you can ask it to mix them together into the perfect running playlist at your exact cadence,” Söderström explained.

Spotify has years of listening history to draw on, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip, and the music they discover. That information can help it make recommendations that feel more personal than a generic playlist generated by an AI assistant that doesn’t know much about someone’s tastes.

However, Söderström also emphasized that Spotify isn’t sending its listener data to partners. Instead, the agent asks Spotify for something, and Spotify uses its own systems to reason about the request and choose what to play.