Spotify was a music app at one point. Then it added podcasts. Then there are the 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, is turning more towards using AI to generate content than using AI to help users find the content they really want.
Until now, Spotify has been a platform for human-created content – music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As it adds powerful AI tools to create all those formats, the app is ready to look very different. That change creates conflict; AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can handle it.
Last year, the company was criticized for mislabeling AI music. Following that backlash, the company changed its policy and adopted the industry standard DDEX – a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks – in 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 deal ensures that artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform, and may make it harder for listeners to discover up-and-coming artists.
Spotify is also partnering with AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that allows authors to download audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, the AI narration can still feel unnatural at times.
Stranger is still the company’s push for production: the personal podcasts feature allows users to produce AI-powered podcasts from anything, including snapshots of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company launched a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and store them in their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to create personal podcasts using commands directly in the app.
The company is also releasing an experimental desktop application that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls relevant information, and generates personalized audio prompts. It’s the kind of feature that could live within Spotify’s existing app – which makes choosing to spin it a unique product worth watching.
“With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: research topics, use a web browser, organize information, and help complete tasks,” reads the app’s description. The language tells you: Spotify is looking at agent AI – software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t expand further, but given its desire 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 helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural language availability to audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people into conversational search. The foundation 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 specific podcast episode or its themes in general. 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 be the all-in-one audio app, but in that quest, it fills itself with features users didn’t ask for and makes it confusing and difficult to navigate.
The company is no longer just focused on usability – it’s moving users to create content, even if it’s their own. The danger 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 from other creators, raising the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive edge or refining what made it important? If users feel like the app has lost focus and isn’t showing the content they’re looking for, many of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door – and take their time listening too.
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