{"id":620764,"date":"2026-08-04T23:32:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T23:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/620764\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T23:32:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T23:32:22","slug":"spotify-execs-bet-people-will-pay-for-ai-music-stock-price-plunges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/620764\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify Execs Bet People Will Pay for AI Music. Stock Price Plunges"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is plenty of industry debate about AI investment and costs,\u201d Spotify co-CEO Gustav S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m said on the company\u2019s earnings call. \u201cOur view is that being an AI beneficiary means winning on the cost side too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer, the company rolled out a new feature called \u201cTalk to Spotify,<\/a>\u201d allowing Premium users to interact with the platform more conversationally via a chatbot interface.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like Spotify is coming alive, and you can literally start talking to it,\u201d S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m said. \u201cYou can literally talk to Spotify now, and you get very good answers about the music, about who played in what band, when they\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another splashy AI initiative includes embracing AI-generated music<\/a>. 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.\u00a0On Tuesday, Spotify announced that Merlin, a digital rights licensing partner representing independent labels and distributors, was also joining to support the feature.<\/p>\n

Spotify argues their way of doing AI-generated music is just different, and better, than how other AI music generators go about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile you can see that there is skepticism around net new artificial music by many people out there, what we\u2019re doing is something different, and artists see that our products are about real artists, not fake artists, and in the case of remixes, real artists with real voices,\u201d S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m said. \u201cSo you\u2019re listening to real people. That\u2019s a very different proposition, which is why we\u2019re focusing on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m\u2019s co-CEO Alex Norstr\u00f6m agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is very considerate and planned out,\u201d Norstr\u00f6m said on the call.<\/p>\n

Norstr\u00f6m says the company is looking at the 3Cs while building out the feature: consent from artists, credit to artists, and compensation for artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re talking about the first legal way to partake in this AI tailwind that we see coming for interactive music,\u201d Norstr\u00f6m said.<\/p>\n

The tool has yet to launch, but when it does, it will be a paid add-on. Though the timing on that is still murky; on the call, S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m said that the feature will first launch as a \u201cresearch preview\u201d but only \u201cwhen it\u2019s ready\u201d and is actually appealing to consumers, without giving a specific time frame.<\/p>\n

While Spotify is spending all this money on creating better paid features, executives say they are simultaneously and \u201ccarefully\u201d introducing \u201csome friction\u201d in the free tier to drive users to paid subscriptions, including some limitations and more ads than before.<\/p>\n

At market close, Spotify\u2019s stock price was down 8%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spotify hit 777 million total users and 300 million paid premium subscribers in the past quarter, company executives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,20105,289,290,18,19,17,14353,82],"class_list":["post-620764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-music","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-spotify","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117039854230630397","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}