Spotify was a music app once upon a time. Then he added podcasts. Then 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, leans heavily toward using AI to create content rather than using AI to help users find content they actually want.
Until now, Spotify has largely been a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts and audiobooks. As it adds AI-powered tools to create all these shapes, the app is poised to look very different. This change also creates friction – AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can handle it.
Last year, the company was criticized not properly marked AI music. Following this backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the industry standard DDEX – a widely used tagging system for identifying AI-generated tracks – for 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 artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform and could make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists.
Spotify is also partnering with AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that allows authors to narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, the AI narration can sound unnatural at times.
Stranger is still the company’s productivity push: The personal podcast feature lets users create AI-generated podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company unveiled a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to the Spotify library. With the latest version, all users will be able to create personal podcasts via messages directly in 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 a personalized audio update. It’s the kind of feature that could exist within the existing Spotify app — making the choice to spin it into a separate 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,” the app’s description reads. The language is telling: Spotify is gesturing to agent AI — software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t elaborate, but given its ambition to own all things 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 Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural language discovery for audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google nudges people toward conversational search. The foundation is already there: Spotify already has a DJ AI that lets you chat while listening to music.
Now users can ask questions to get answers about a specific podcast episode or its topics more broadly. They may already be doing it in chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app.
Spotify is trying hard to be an all-in-one audio app, but in this quest, it fills itself with features that users didn’t ask for and makes it confusing and harder to navigate.
The company is no longer solely focused on consumption — it’s actively pushing 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 understanding a messy app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content from other creators. This begs the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diminishing what made it necessary? If users feel like the app has lost focus and isn’t showing the content they want, more of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door — and take the listening time with them.
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