{"id":439250,"date":"2026-05-22T01:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T01:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/439250\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T01:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T01:23:09","slug":"spotifys-next-era-ai-and-content-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/439250\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify’s Next Era? AI and Content Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSpotify<\/a> is leaning further into AI<\/a> as it holds to its promise of reaching 1 billion active users by 2030.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the company\u2019s investor day in New York Thursday, executives laid out the planned pathway for hitting that number, as well as $100 billion in annual revenue, with new features including the ability to create AI-generated personalized <\/a>podcasts, user-generated covers and remixes<\/a> using AI and more. Spotify also plans to continue creating more paid add-on services or subscriptions, alongside its audiobooks offering, which they say has been one of its most-engaged segments on the platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs co-CEO Gustav S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m laid out, in the beginning, the company\u2019s motto was access. Spotify then moved into personalization, with curated playlists and more. Next up is \u201cgeneration,\u201d drawing on AI tools to help create content on the platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re entering the era of generation, where the experience isn\u2019t just selected from a catalog. It\u2019s shaped by each of our users, in real time, around their taste, context, and intent. Today, there is no media player for both public and private content \u2013 or put differently \u2013 there is no media player for the generative era. We believe Spotify will become that,\u201d said Gustav S\u00f6derstr\u00f6m, co-CEO of Spotify.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe personalized podcasts and user-generated covers and remixes join existing personalization products on Spotify including AI DJ, which creates curated playlists for the user, and Prompted Playlists. Spotify also unveiled a desktop app which can create a audio daily briefing or a podcast based on the user\u2019s emails and schedule.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea in leaning into AI and offering more personalized products is to help improve retention, conversion to paid membership and time spent on the platform, as Spotify gains a deeper understanding of the individual. AI can also be used to add in more content in the language of each market, and make it localised faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tNicole Burrow, VP of Design, Spotify speaks onstage at the Spotify Investor Day 2026 Morning Presentation at Highline Studios on May 21, 2026 in New York City. <\/p>\n

\n\tAs it stands, the company last reported 761 million global monthly active users, with 293 million of those as subscribers. Annual revenue was about $18.5 billion in 2025.\u00a0 Spotify highlighted potential future user growth in Brazil, India and The Philippines among other markets.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmid the AI talk, the company also announced that its Audiobooks segment is on track to reach $100 million in annualized recurring revenue from Audiobooks+ subscriptions this July. Paid users already have access to 15 free hours of audiobook content, with the add-on Audiobooks+ subscription giving them an additional 15 hours. In less than a year, more than one million users are already paying for audiobooks, according to Spotify.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt has also seen some of the deepest continued engagement on Spotify, which is a metric the company is leaning into moving forward.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe number of times that you come back to us in a month, and the number of devices you use might be among the most important metrics that we monitor,\u201d N\u00f6rdstrom said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Thursday, the company also announced the creation of more add-on tiers for its audiobook offering, which offer more hours for a higher price. This comes as part of a plan to increase the amount of revenue generated by users that already subscribe. The company recently introduced fitness<\/a>, via partnership with Peloton to stream videos on the platform. which executives said they believe has the \u201cpotential to become a meaningful vertical in its own right.\u201d Executives also said they are eyeing several more future verticals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPodcasting has also \u201cmade significant progress,\u201d according to CFO Christian Luiga, who described the segment\u2019s gross margin as \u201cdeeply negative\u201d in 2021 and growing to 20 percent in 2026. He added that the company sees \u201ca path to 40 percent\u201d gross margin, which will be driven by both first and third-party content.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWith the additional add-ons and new features, there will be further price increases down the line, but executives noted that there has been little churn with the prior increases.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou can expect us to continue on this journey. But we always want the user to win,\u201d N\u00f6rdstrom said of price increases.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the second and third quarter, the company said it will increase its spending in marketing and research and development as it adjusts to these new realities and may allocate capital to M&A, according to Luiga, while maintaining a \u201cbuild-first strategy.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\n\tBut overall Spotify, which has previously gone through a number of cost-cutting measures, said it would be relying on greater efficiency through AI. \u201cWe\u2019re no longer scaling by increasing headcount, we\u2019re scaling by increasing the impact of the people that we already have,\u201d one executive said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCFO Christian Luiga speaks onstage at the Spotify Investor Day 2026 Morning Presentation at Highline Studios on May 21, 2026 in New York City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spotify is leaning further into AI as it holds to its promise of reaching 1 billion active users…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,18609,145],"class_list":["post-439250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-spotify","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}