Spotify wants to be the default media service for AI agents, co-CEO says

Spotify reported its third-quarter 2026 results on October 22, with 788 million monthly active users and revenue of nearly €5 billion. During the earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Söderström said Spotify is one of the few companies positioned to thrive in the agentic age, with a goal of becoming the go-to media service for AI agents.

Söderström noted that agents are good at handling tasks people prefer to avoid, but entertainment is different. Rather than opening the app and building playlists manually, users can ask an AI assistant to handle discovery for them. Spotify wants to be the service those agents turn to, enabling music discovery and interaction through conversation.

The company has integrated with Meta's Muse assistant, ChatGPT, and Claude, and says it is seeing strong adoption inside these agents. Spotify was the first music service to integrate with Meta's Muse. Söderström described Spotify as "an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent," allowing users to talk to it, ask questions, and give instructions from within the app or through another agent.

He gave an example of asking Spotify to scan listening history back to 2008, select favorite tracks, adjust their tempo, sort them by key and BPM, and mix them into a running playlist. Söderström also emphasized that Spotify does not share listener data with partners; when an agent makes a request, Spotify's own systems reason about it and decide what to play.