Spotify used its Investor Day on Thursday to unveil the most comprehensive AI expansion in the company’s history, repositioning itself from a passive audio consumption platform into an active, AI-powered creation and discovery engine spanning podcasts, audiobooks, and licensed music generation.
The centrepiece was Studio by Spotify Labs, a new standalone desktop app launching in research preview across more than twenty markets. Powered by an AI agent that can browse the web and connect to users’ email and calendars, Studio generates fully personalised podcasts from natural language prompts. A user could, for example, request a daily audio brief combining their schedule, travel bookings, local restaurant recommendations, and a curated podcast suggestion for a road trip — and receive a single generated audio file saved privately to their Spotify library. The format places Spotify in direct competition with Google’s NotebookLM, which pioneered AI podcast generation, as well as ElevenLabs and Adobe, which have since adopted similar approaches.
Personal podcast creation is also coming directly to the main Spotify app, where Premium users will be able to schedule recurring daily or weekly AI-generated briefings on topics of their choice, or create one-off audio explainers. Users can supply links, PDFs, and text as source material and select a custom voice. A new AI-powered question-and-answer feature is also rolling out to Premium mobile users in the United States, Sweden, and Ireland, allowing listeners to ask questions about episodes they are currently hearing — a capability comparable to Google’s Ask YouTube feature launched earlier in the week.
On audiobooks, Spotify announced an ElevenLabs-powered self-publishing tool launching in beta in June on an invite-only basis, initially supporting English. Authors using the tool retain the freedom to publish their AI-narrated audiobooks elsewhere, with no exclusivity requirement. The Spotify for Authors platform is simultaneously expanding to support ten additional languages including French, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian. Spotify said its audiobook catalogue has reached 700,000 titles, listening hours have grown sixty percent year-on-year, and the platform is on track to generate $100 million in annualised recurring revenue from more than one million Audiobook+ subscriptions. A natural language discovery tool and prompt-based audiobook playlists are also coming this summer.
Perhaps the most commercially significant announcement was a licensing agreement with Universal Music Group allowing Spotify Premium subscribers to use generative AI to create covers and remixes of songs by participating artists, with a revenue share flowing back to those artists and rights holders. Unlike rivals Suno and Udio, which built AI music tools without label consent and subsequently faced major copyright lawsuits — Suno settled a $500 million claim with Warner Music Group — Spotify negotiated upfront agreements before launching. Co-CEO Alex Norström described the approach as grounded in consent, credit, and compensation. UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge said the tool would deepen fan relationships while creating new revenue streams for artists. Pricing and a launch date were not disclosed, but UMG may be the first of several label partnerships.
Taken together, Thursday’s announcements mark a decisive strategic shift. Spotify is no longer simply the place people go to listen to what others have made. It is building the infrastructure for AI to generate, narrate, remix, and personalise audio at scale — and it is moving faster than almost anyone in the industry anticipated.
