Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want

Spotify was a music app at one time. Then it added podcasts. Then audiobooks. Now the company is piling AI features into its app at a pace that can feel overwhelming. The latest wave, announced at its investor day, skews heavily toward using AI to generate content rather than using AI to help users find content they actually want. Until now, Spotify has been largely a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different. That shift is also creating friction — AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it. Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. Following that backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks — for its catalog. Now Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. While this agreement ensures artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform and could make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists. Spotify is also partnering with the AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can still sound unnatural at times. Stranger still is the company’s productivity push: The personal podcasts feature lets users generate AI-made podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to build personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app. Image Credits:Spotify The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls in relevant information, and generates a personalized audio briefing. It’s the kind of feature that could have lived inside the existing Spotify app — which makes the choice to spin it into a separate product worth watching. “With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: researching topics, using a web browser, organizing information, and helping complete tasks,” the app’s description reads. The language is a tell: Spotify is gesturing toward agentic AI — software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t elaborate further, but given its ambition to own all things audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like AI meeting notes, in the style of Granola, eventually making its way into Spotify. All of this adds up to more content on the platform, and Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural-language discovery for audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people toward conversational search. The groundwork is already there: Spotify already has an AI DJ that lets you chat while listening to music. Now users can ask questions to get answers about a particular podcast episode or its themes more broadly. They might already be doing this in chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app. Spotify is trying hard to become an everything-audio app, but in that quest, it is filling itself with features users didn’t ask for and making it confusing and harder to navigate. The company is no longer focused solely on consumption — it’s actively nudging users to create content, too, even if it’s just for themselves. The risk is that this trades depth for breadth: The more time users spend making sense of a cluttered app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content by other creators. This raises the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diluting what made it essential? If users feel that the app has lost focus and isn’t surfacing the content they want, more of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door — and take their listening time with them.