Spotify押注AI时代：成为各类AI Agent首选的音乐服务

Spotify 公布了表现强劲的第三季度财报，月活跃用户数（MAU）达到 7.88 亿，单季营收近 50 亿欧元（约合 56 亿美元）。但财报电话会议上更引人注目的亮点，是该公司对未来人们如何收听音乐的构想，以及为什么 AI Agent 的兴起可能对其业务构成重大利好。

Spotify 联合首席执行官古斯塔夫·瑟德斯特伦（Gustav Söderström）认为，这家流媒体音乐巨头尤其契合这一行业转型。

“Spotify 属于少数能在 Agent 时代蓬勃发展的品类之一，”Söderström 对投资者表示，“这是因为 Agent 擅长替代和处理人们不愿亲自去做的事情。人们乐于摆脱繁杂的琐事。但娱乐恰恰相反，没有人会让 Agent 替自己‘总结一首歌’。”

未来，听众不再需要打开 Spotify、搜索歌手并手动创建播放列表，而是可以直接要求 AI 助手代劳。他们可能需要一段适合跑步的音乐、一个关于他们刚与 AI 讨论过的话题的播客，或者一份无缝衔接上次收听进度的有声书内容提要。

Spotify 希望成为这些 Agent 首选的底层媒体服务，让用户能够通过日常对话、而非仅限于其自有 App 来发现音乐并与 Spotify 互动。值得注意的是，Spotify 是首个接入 Meta 旗下 Muse 助手 的音乐服务，目前还已接入了 ChatGPT 和 Claude。

“我们的目标是成为你在任何 Agent 中都能调用的媒体服务，真正把 Agent 的增长转化为顺风动力，而非逆风阻力。这正是我们目前所看到的趋势。我们观察到 Spotify 在这些 Agent 内部得到了非常良好的采用。当其他公司可能还在犹豫不决、甚至许多公司选择退避时，我们正在积极参与并拥抱这一增长，而不是站在路边观望，”Söderström 表示。

目前，市场上关于 Agent 如何调用第三方服务已经出现摩擦迹象。例如，亚马逊（Amazon） 已经阻止了 Meta 的 Muse 在其平台上进行购物操作，这表明当涉及访问权限、安全性、隐私或商业控制权等问题时，行业巨头可能会限制外部 Agent 的访问。

Spotify 的主张不仅在于 AI 应该让娱乐内容更容易被找到，更在于它应该让体验更加个性化。

Söderström 将如今的 Spotify 描述为“一个封装为 Agent 的智能媒体服务，无论你是直接通过我们的 App 使用，还是经由其他 Agent 间接调用……Spotify 如今本身就是一个 Agent，你不仅能在 App 中点击它，还能与它交谈、向它提问并向其发出指令。我们今天能做到的事情，是其他媒体服务无法企及的，”他说道。

“例如，你可以让 Spotify 逐首梳理你自 2008 年以来的听歌历史，筛选出你真正喜欢的曲目，通过加快或放慢节奏来进行节拍拉伸（beat-stretching），然后按照调式和 BPM 进行排序。接着，你还可以让它把这些曲目混音成一份契合你精准跑步步频的完美跑步歌单，”Söderström 解释道。

Spotify 拥有多年积累的收听历史数据作为支撑，包括用户反复收听的艺术家、跳过的歌曲以及新发现的音乐。这些沉淀的信息有助于提供更具个性化的推荐，远胜于那些不太了解个人品味的外部 AI 助手所生成的通用歌单。

不过，Söderström 也强调，Spotify 并不会将听众数据发送给合作伙伴。相反，外部 Agent 仅向 Spotify 提出请求，由 Spotify 自身的系统对该请求进行推理，并决定播放哪些内容。

Spotify had a strong third quarter, reaching 788 million monthly active users and generating nearly €5 billion (around $5.6 billion USD) in revenue. But the more interesting takeaway from its earnings call was how the company sees people listening to music in the future, and why the rise of AI agents could be good news for its business.

Co-CEO Gustav Söderström thinks the music streaming giant is particularly well-suited to this shift.

“Spotify is in one of the few categories that actually stands to thrive in the agentic age,” Söderström tells investors. “This is because agents excel at replacing and taking care of things people would rather not do. People love getting rid of chores. But entertainment is the opposite. Nobody asks an agent to ‘summarize a song’ for them.”

Instead of opening Spotify, searching for an artist, and building a playlist themselves, listeners could ask an AI assistant to do the work for them. They might want music for a run, a podcast about something they’ve been discussing with an AI, or an audiobook recap that picks up exactly where they left off.

Spotify wants to be the service those agents turn to, letting people discover music and interact with Spotify through conversations rather than just its own app. Notably, Spotify was the first music service to integrate with Meta’s Muse assistant, and it also integrates with ChatGPT and Claude.

“Our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent, really turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind. That is exactly what we are seeing now. We are seeing really good adoption of Spotify inside these agents. While other companies are maybe trying to figure out what to do and many are leaning out, we are actually leaning in and participating in the growth instead of standing by the roadside and looking at it,” said Söderström.

The market is already showing signs of friction over how agents access third-party services. Amazon, for example, has blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform, illustrating how major players may restrict outside agents when questions arise around access, security, privacy, or commercial control.

Spotify’s pitch isn’t just that AI should just make entertainment easier to find. It should make the experience more personal, too.

Söderström describes Spotify today as “an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly through our application or via another agent…Spotify is now an agent that you can not only click on in our app, but talk to, ask questions of, and instruct. We can do things today that no other media services can do,” he said.

“For example, you can ask Spotify to go through your listening history song by song back to 2008, picking your true favorites, beat-stretching them by speeding them up or down, and then sorting them by key and BPM. Then you can ask it to mix them together into the perfect running playlist at your exact cadence,” Söderström explained.

Spotify has years of listening history to draw on, including the artists people return to, the songs they skip, and the music they discover. That information can help it make recommendations that feel more personal than a generic playlist generated by an AI assistant that doesn’t know much about someone’s tastes.

However, Söderström also emphasized that Spotify isn’t sending its listener data to partners. Instead, the agent asks Spotify for something, and Spotify uses its own systems to reason about the request and choose what to play.