Spotify’s AI Push: ChatGPT & Playlists to Fight Music App Commoditization
Spotify is betting that artificial intelligence can help it stand out in a crowded streaming music market, recently rolling out a ChatGPT integration and a fresh “Prompted Playlists” feature. The moves come as the company, whose stock price has slumped in the past year, seeks to build stronger user engagement and differentiate itself from competitors like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music.
The new ChatGPT integration allows Spotify users to connect their accounts directly to OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot. Users can then request songs, artists, albums, playlists, or podcast episodes by mood, genre, or topic, with results appearing within ChatGPT and opening in the Spotify app for playback. Spotify says the integration is opt-in and will not share user music or podcast content with OpenAI for training purposes, addressing concerns about copyright and AI-generated music.
Alongside the ChatGPT integration, Spotify launched Prompted Playlists, a feature within the streaming app that allows users to create custom mixes based on a feeling or memory. Spotify executives have described AI as central to the platform’s strategy for retaining subscribers. “Our investments into personalization and AI are paying off,” said Alex Norström, co-chief executive officer, during a recent earnings call. “It means people are spending more days in a month with us and across more moments.”
Spotify’s existing interactive DJ feature, introduced in 2023, already has approximately 90 million subscribers and has accumulated over four billion hours of user listening time. Norström characterized Prompted Playlists as a “Deep Research mode” compared to the more conversational iDJ, allowing users to define rules for personalized playlists.
Analysts suggest Spotify’s AI investments are crucial as music catalogs become increasingly commoditized across streaming services. “The catalogs at Amazon, Apple and YouTube are similar — nearly identical songs — to Spotify, just like Bing and Edge are nearly identical to Google,” said Michael Pachter, senior advisor at Wedbush Securities. He added that Spotify is attempting to replicate Google’s success in building user loyalty through features that increase switching costs, such as saved payment information and curated playlists.
Apple Music is also integrating AI features, with its “Playlist Playground” beta offering chat-based AI interaction for refining recommendations. Apple has also introduced AutoMix, which uses AI to blend tracks based on tempo and beatmatching. Amazon Music launched a prompt-based playlist feature called Maestro in mid-2024, though it remains in beta testing.
The rise of AI-generated music presents both opportunities and challenges for streaming platforms. A recent report by Rothschild & Co Redburn noted that text-to-music platforms are generating around seven million songs per day, equivalent to Spotify’s entire pre-AI catalog every fortnight. Spotify addressed concerns about AI-created music potentially disrupting its platform, arguing that AI supports, rather than undermines, its strategic position.
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström emphasized the importance of building a unique dataset of listener preferences. “We are building a dataset that never existed,” he said. “We have had the song-to-song dataset, but no one had the language-to-song dataset… You cannot just have an LLM commoditize it as a fact.” He highlighted the regional variations in music preferences, noting that workout music differs significantly between the U.S. And Scandinavia.