THE CRUNCH
Spotify's third quarter brought 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion in revenue, but the more interesting note from its earnings call was strategic: co-CEO Gustav Söderström argued the company is unusually well placed for an era when AI agents, not apps, handle everyday tasks. His reasoning is that agents excel at chores, while entertainment is the opposite. "Nobody asks an agent to 'summarize a song' for them," he told investors. Instead, listeners might ask an assistant for music to suit a run, or an audiobook recap that resumes where they left off, and Spotify wants to be the service those agents call on.
The company is already positioning itself accordingly. Spotify was the first music service to integrate with Meta's Muse assistant, and it also works with ChatGPT and Claude. Söderström said adoption of Spotify inside these agents is already strong, and framed the shift as a tailwind rather than a threat: "we are actually leaning in and participating in the growth instead of standing by the roadside and looking at it."
Not every platform is so welcoming. Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse from shopping on its site, a sign of the friction that can arise when outside agents touch third-party services over questions of access, privacy and commercial control. Spotify's answer to the trust question is architectural: it does not send listener data to partners. When an agent asks for something, Spotify reasons about the request on its own systems and chooses what to play.
The company also argues its long listening histories, including what people replay, skip and discover, let it personalise in ways a generic assistant playlist cannot. Söderström offered one example: asking Spotify to dig through your listening history back to 2008, pick your true favourites, adjust their tempo and mix them into a running playlist matched to your exact cadence.