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

Spotify was a music app at one time. Then she added podcasts. Then audiobooks. The company is now packing AI features into its app at a pace that may seem exhausting. The latest wave, announced at Investor Day, is moving more heavily toward using AI to create 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. And since it adds AI-powered tools to create all these formats, the app is expected to look completely different. This shift is also creating friction, as AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage.

Last year, the company was criticized for not properly classifying AI music. In the wake of this backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the industry standard DDEX — a tagging system widely used to identify AI-generated tracks — into 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 that artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform and may make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists.

Spotify is also teaming up with AI audio company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can sometimes sound unnatural.

What’s even weirder is the company’s productivity boost: The Personal Podcast feature lets users create AI-made podcasts about anything, including their calendar summaries and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers who use AI programming assistants like Codex and Cloud Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to create personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app.

The company is also launching a beta desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls relevant information, and creates a personalized audio summary. It’s the kind of feature that could have existed within the existing Spotify app, which makes the option of turning it into a separate product worth a look.

“With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: search topics, use the web browser, organize information, and help complete tasks,” the app’s description reads. The language is clear: Spotify is moving toward agentic AI, software that not only answers questions but completes tasks autonomously for you. 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, Granola-style, eventually making its way to Spotify.

All of this adds up to more content on the platform, and Spotify’s answer to help users navigate it is AI again. The company is adding natural language detection to audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google is pushing people toward conversational search. The foundation is already in place: Spotify already has an AI-powered DJ player that lets you chat while listening to music.

Users can now ask questions to get answers about a specific podcast episode or its topics more broadly. They may 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 audio app, but in that effort, it stuffs itself with features that users didn’t ask for and makes it confusing and difficult to navigate.

The company is no longer solely focused on consumption, it actively encourages users to create content as well, even if it’s just for them. The danger is that this trades depth for breadth: the more time users spend understanding a messy app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content created by other creators. This raises the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diluting what makes it essential? If users feel the app is losing focus and not showing the content they want, more of them might follow my colleague Amanda out of the house – and take their listening time with them.