Spotify used to be a music app. Next, we added podcasts. Then audiobooks. The company is currently building AI capabilities into its apps at an overwhelming pace. The latest wave announced at Investor Day is heavily biased toward using AI to generate content, rather than using AI to help users find the content they actually need.
Until now, Spotify has primarily been a platform for human-generated content such as music, podcasts, and audiobooks. The app will look completely different as we add AI-powered tools to generate all these formats. This change is also creating friction. AI can now generate music faster than Spotify can manage it.
The company was criticized last year for not properly labeling AI music. In response to the backlash, Spotify changed its tune and adopted industry standard DDEX for its catalog, a widely used labeling system to identify AI-generated tracks. Now, Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. While the agreement guarantees compensation for artists, it will bring more AI music to the platform, potentially making it harder for listeners to discover up-and-coming human artists.
Spotify is also partnering with AI voice company Eleven Labs to release a tool that allows authors to narrate audiobooks using AI voices. This speeds up audiobook production, but AI narration can still sound unnatural.
Stranger continues to drive productivity improvements at the company. The Personal Podcasts feature allows users to generate AI-generated podcasts about anything, including calendars and email summaries. Earlier this month, the company introduced tools for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code to create podcasts and save them to your Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to create personal podcasts directly from an in-app prompt.
The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to users’ email, notes, and calendars, retrieves relevant information, and generates personalized audio briefings. This is the kind of functionality that could exist within the existing Spotify app, so the choice to spin this out as a separate product is notable.
“With your permission, we can perform actions on your behalf, such as researching topics, using your web browser, organizing information, and helping you complete tasks,” the app’s description says. This language communicates. Spotify is aiming for agent AI, software that not only answers questions but also autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t provide any further details, but given the company’s ambitions to own all things audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like Granola-style AI meeting notes eventually making its way to Spotify.
All of this adds even more content on the platform. Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate the platform is, after all, AI. The company is adding natural language search to audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people to conversational search. The foundations are already in place. Spotify already has an AI DJ that lets you chat while listening to music.
Users can now ask questions and get answers about specific podcast episodes or their broader themes. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini may already be doing this, but Spotify doesn’t want you to leave the app.
Spotify is trying hard to be an all-in-one audio app, but in that quest it’s packed in features that users don’t want, making it confusing and difficult to navigate.
The company is no longer solely focused on consumption, but actively encourages users to create content, even if it’s just for themselves. The risk is that this trades breadth for depth. The more time users spend making sense of cluttered apps, the less time they’ll spend finding and listening to content from other creators. This begs the question: Is Spotify deepening a competitive moat or weakening something essential? If users feel like the app is distracting and doesn’t show them the content they want, more of them might follow their colleague Amanda out and spend some time listening to music together.
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