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

Spotify was a music app at one time. 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, skews heavily toward using AI to generate 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. As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different. That shift is also creating friction — AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it. Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. Following that backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling 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 agreement 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 the AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can still sound unnatural at times. Stranger still is the company’s productivity push: The personal podcasts feature lets users generate AI-made podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to build personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app.

Key points

• Until now, Spotify has been largely a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts, and audiobooks.
• As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different.
• That shift is also creating friction — AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it.
• Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music.
• Following that backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks — for its catalog.