Spotify hit 777 million total users and 300 million paid premium subscribers in the past quarter, company executives shared in an earnings release on Tuesday, along with an AI-driven increase in expenses. Spotify has been upping its experimentation with artificial intelligence recently, banking on a slew of new AI-driven product features to continue the rise in paid subscriptions. “There is plenty of industry debate about AI investment and costs,” Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström said on the company’s earnings call. “Our view is that being an AI beneficiary means winning on the cost side too.” Earlier this summer, the company rolled out a new feature called “Talk to Spotify,” allowing Premium users to interact with the platform more conversationally via a chatbot interface. “I feel like Spotify is coming alive, and you can literally start talking to it,” Söderström said. “You can literally talk to Spotify now, and you get very good answers about the music, about who played in what band, when they’re touring, what the song is about. These are better answers than you get from any LLM, certainly within our domains about podcasts and books and music.”
Another splashy AI initiative includes embracing AI-generated music. Although much of the music industry remains wary of AI-generated songs, Spotify is embracing the technology. The company is partnering with Universal Music Group on a tool that would let users create AI-generated remixes and covers of songs by participating artists. On Tuesday, Spotify announced that Merlin, a digital rights licensing partner representing independent labels and distributors, was also joining to support the feature.
