Spotify closed the third quarter with 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion (about $5.6 billion) in revenue. Beyond those financial results, company leaders are highlighting a strategic push: becoming the media service that AI agents call upon when users ask for music, podcasts or audiobooks.
Strategy for an agent-driven experience
Co-CEO Gustav Söderström told investors the company believes Spotify is well positioned for what he called the “agentic age.” He argued that AI assistants tend to take over tasks people prefer not to do, but entertainment is different because listeners want the content itself rather than a summary.
Söderström described scenarios in which users ask an AI assistant to find music for a run, pull up a podcast discussed with another agent, or resume an audiobook at the precise point where they left off. In that model, the agent routes the request to a media service; Spotify wants to be the service those agents select.
Integrations, personalization and data handling
The company has already integrated with agents including Meta’s Muse assistant, as well as ChatGPT and Claude. Söderström said Spotify sees growing adoption inside these agent environments and is choosing to participate actively rather than wait on the sidelines.
Spotify points to its long history of listening data — which includes artists users return to, songs they skip and discovery patterns — as a source of personalization that an external assistant without that history cannot match. Söderström emphasized that Spotify does not send listener data to partners; instead, an agent requests a result and Spotify’s systems perform the reasoning and selection internally.
Executives also acknowledged broader market friction over how agents access third-party services, citing examples such as Amazon blocking Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform. Spotify’s current approach is to build direct integrations and to keep control of how listener information is used when responding to agent requests.
Original source: TechCrunch AI