Spotify was once a music app. Then we added podcasts. Then the audiobook. Now, companies are adding AI features to their apps at a rate that can feel overwhelming. The latest wave, announced at Investor Day, leans heavily toward using AI to generate content rather than using AI to help users find the content they actually want.
Until now, Spotify has primarily been a platform for human-created content, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As we add AI-based tools to generate all of these formats, our apps are poised to look very different. These changes also create friction. AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage.
Last year, it was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. In response to this backlash, the company changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard for its catalog, a widely used labeling system to identify AI-generated tracks. Now, Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that will allow fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. The deal guarantees compensation to artists, but could bring more AI music to the platform and make it more difficult for listeners to discover emerging human artists.
Spotify is also partnering with AI voice company ElevenLabs to launch a tool that will allow authors to narrate audiobooks using AI voices. This speeds up audiobook creation, but AI narration can sometimes sound unnatural.
What is still unfamiliar is improving company productivity. The personal podcast feature allows users to create AI-generated podcasts about anything, including calendar and email summaries. Earlier this month, the company launched a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code to create podcasts and save them to the Spotify library. The latest release allows all users to create personal podcasts via messaging directly from the app.
The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls relevant information, and creates personalized audio briefings. This is the kind of feature that could have existed inside the existing Spotify app, making the choice to turn it into a separate product worth watching.
“With your permission, it can take action on your behalf, including researching topics, using your web browser, organizing information, and helping you complete tasks,” the app description says. The languages are: Spotify is moving toward Agent AI, software that not only answers questions but also automatically completes tasks on behalf of users. The company didn’t elaborate further, but given its ambitions to own everything in audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like Granola-style AI meeting notes eventually making its way to Spotify.
All of this adds more content to the platform, and AI is Spotify’s answer to helping users explore it. The company is adding natural language search capabilities to audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google drives people into conversational searches. The basic work is already done. Spotify already has an AI DJ that you can chat with while listening to music.
Users can now ask questions to get answers about a specific podcast episode or the topic more broadly. You may already be doing this with chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app.
Spotify is trying hard to become the go-to audio app, but along the way, it’s become filled with features users didn’t ask for and has become confusing and difficult to navigate.
Companies are no longer solely focused on consumption and are actively encouraging users to create content, even if it’s just for themselves. The danger is that this trades depth for breadth. The more time users spend trying to understand complex apps, the less time they have to discover and listen to content from other creators, raising the question of whether Spotify is deepening its competitive moat or diluting the core of the app. If users feel like the app has lost focus and isn’t showing them the content they want, more users may follow my colleague Amanda out the door and spend some listening time together.
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