Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström: Agents Will Replace Chores, But Not Music Listening

Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström presented a judgment to investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call: the era of AI agents represents a tailwind, not a headwind, for music streaming services. His logic begins with a distinction—agents excel at completing tasks people would rather not do, such as chores and repetitive labor, whereas entertainment consumption is the opposite.

“Nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them,” he said.

Based on this assessment, Spotify’s goal is not to have agents replace its own app, but to become the service that agents proactively invoke when users need music. Söderström described an interaction model where users no longer manually open Spotify to search for artists or curate playlists; instead, they tell their AI assistant what music to play while running or ask it to continue listening to a podcast discussed with the AI, with the agent initiating the request to Spotify.

This strategy is supported by Spotify’s accumulated years of listening data—including artists users repeatedly return to, songs they skip, and newly discovered tracks. Söderström provided an example: users can ask Spotify to filter through their listening history back to 2008, selecting true favorites, adjusting beat speeds by speeding up or slowing down tracks, sorting them by key and BPM, and then mixing them into a running playlist that matches their exact cadence. He argued that a generic AI assistant unfamiliar with user preferences cannot generate equally personalized results.