The key facts

  • 788 million MAU and revenue of nearly €5 billion (~$5.6 billion) for the third quarter
  • Spotify was the first music service to integrate with Meta Muse, and also works with ChatGPT and Claude
  • Listener data is not shared with partners — Spotify itself processes agent requests

A strong quarter and a bet on agents

Spotify ended the third quarter with 788 million monthly active users and revenue of nearly €5 billion (about $5.6 billion). However, as TechCrunch notes, the more interesting part of the report was the company's vision of the future of music listening and the role of AI agents. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström told investors that Spotify is in 'one of the few categories that can thrive in the agentic era': agents, in his words, are good for eliminating routine tasks, and entertainment is the opposite case, since no one would ask an agent to 'summarize a song.'

Use case scenario

Instead of opening the app, searching for an artist and assembling a playlist, a listener will be able to delegate this to an AI assistant: music for a run, a podcast on the topic of a recent conversation with an AI, or a recap of an audiobook from where they left off. Spotify wants to be the service that agents turn to in such cases. The company was the first among music services to integrate with the Meta Muse assistant, and also works with ChatGPT and Claude.

'A tailwind, not a headwind'

'Our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent, turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind. That is exactly what we are seeing: we see really good adoption of Spotify within these agents,' said Söderström, adding that Spotify 'leans in' while other companies 'are perhaps trying to figure out what to do, and many are leaning toward opting out.'

The market is already showing friction

TechCrunch points to signs of tension around agents' access to third-party services: Amazon blocked Meta Muse from making purchases on its platform — an example of how major players can restrict external agents over questions of access, security, privacy or commercial control.

Personalization and data

Söderström described Spotify as 'an intelligent media service encapsulated in an agent' that you can talk to, ask questions of and give instructions to. He gave an example: the service could go through your listening history since 2008, pick out true favorites, stretch or speed up tracks, sort them by key and BPM, and mix them into a perfect running playlist for the desired cadence. Years of listening history — returning artists, skipped songs, discoveries — make recommendations more personal than the generic playlists of a third-party assistant. At the same time, Söderström emphasized, Spotify does not pass listener data to partners: the agent queries Spotify, and the company itself processes the request with its own systems and chooses what to include.