Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want
Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want
Spotify 的 AI 豪赌：内容泛滥，却离用户需求渐行渐远
Spotify was a music app at one time. Then it added podcasts. Then audiobooks. Now the company is piling AI features into its app at a pace that can feel overwhelming. The latest wave, announced at its investor day, skews heavily toward using AI to generate content rather than using AI to help users find content they actually want.
Spotify 曾经是一款纯粹的音乐应用。后来它加入了播客，接着是有声书。如今，该公司正以一种令人感到应接不暇的速度，将各种 AI 功能堆砌到应用中。在投资者日宣布的最新一波浪潮中，其重心严重偏向于利用 AI 生成内容，而非利用 AI 帮助用户找到他们真正想要的内容。
Until now, Spotify has been largely a platform for human-created content — music, podcasts, and audiobooks. As it adds AI-powered tools to generate all of those formats, the app is poised to look very different. That shift is also creating friction — AI can now produce music faster than Spotify can manage it. Last year, the company was criticized for not properly labeling AI music. Following that backlash, Spotify changed its policy and adopted the DDEX industry standard — a widely used labeling system for identifying AI-generated tracks — for its catalog.
在此之前，Spotify 在很大程度上是一个以人类创作内容为主的平台——包括音乐、播客和有声书。随着它不断增加用于生成这些格式的 AI 工具，这款应用的面貌注定会发生巨大改变。这种转变也带来了摩擦——AI 生产音乐的速度已经超过了 Spotify 的管理能力。去年，该公司因未能正确标记 AI 生成的音乐而受到批评。在舆论压力下，Spotify 修改了政策，并为其曲库采用了 DDEX 行业标准——这是一种广泛用于识别 AI 生成曲目的标记系统。
Now Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers and remixes of existing songs. While this agreement ensures artists are compensated, it will bring more AI music to the platform and could make it harder for listeners to discover emerging human artists. Spotify is also partnering with the AI voice company ElevenLabs to release a tool that lets authors narrate audiobooks using AI voices. While this speeds up audiobook production, AI narration can still sound unnatural at times.
目前，Spotify 已与环球音乐集团（UMG）签署协议，允许粉丝创作现有歌曲的 AI 翻唱和混音版本。虽然该协议确保了艺术家的报酬，但它也会将更多的 AI 音乐引入平台，并可能使听众更难发现新兴的人类艺术家。此外，Spotify 还与 AI 语音公司 ElevenLabs 合作推出了一款工具，允许作者使用 AI 语音录制有声书。虽然这加快了有声书的制作速度，但 AI 配音有时听起来仍不够自然。
Stranger still is the company’s productivity push: The personal podcasts feature lets users generate AI-made podcasts about anything, including summaries of their calendars and emails. Earlier this month, the company introduced a tool for developers using AI coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, allowing them to create podcasts and save them to their Spotify library. With the latest release, all users will be able to build personal podcasts through prompts directly in the app.
更奇怪的是该公司在生产力工具上的发力：个人播客功能允许用户生成关于任何内容的 AI 播客，包括日历和电子邮件的摘要。本月初，该公司为使用 Codex 和 Claude Code 等 AI 编程助手的开发者推出了一款工具，允许他们创建播客并将其保存到 Spotify 资料库中。随着最新版本的发布，所有用户都将能够通过应用内的提示词直接构建个人播客。
The company is also releasing an experimental desktop app that connects to a user’s email, notes, and calendar, pulls in relevant information, and generates a personalized audio briefing. It’s the kind of feature that could have lived inside the existing Spotify app — which makes the choice to spin it into a separate product worth watching. “With your permission, it can take action on your behalf: researching topics, using a web browser, organizing information, and helping complete tasks,” the app’s description reads.
该公司还发布了一款实验性桌面应用，它可以连接用户的电子邮件、笔记和日历，提取相关信息并生成个性化的音频简报。这种功能本可以集成在现有的 Spotify 应用中，因此将其拆分为独立产品的做法值得关注。应用描述写道：“在您的许可下，它可以代表您采取行动：研究主题、使用网络浏览器、整理信息并协助完成任务。”
The language is a tell: Spotify is gesturing toward agentic AI — software that doesn’t just answer questions but autonomously completes tasks on your behalf. The company didn’t elaborate further, but given its ambition to own all things audio, it’s not hard to imagine something like AI meeting notes, in the style of Granola, eventually making its way into Spotify.
这些措辞透露了一个信号：Spotify 正在向“代理式 AI”（Agentic AI）靠拢——即不仅能回答问题，还能代表你自主完成任务的软件。该公司没有进一步说明，但考虑到其想要掌控一切音频事物的野心，不难想象类似 Granola 风格的 AI 会议纪要功能最终也会进入 Spotify。
All of this adds up to more content on the platform, and Spotify’s answer to helping users navigate it is, again, AI. The company is adding natural-language discovery for audiobooks and podcasts, similar to how Google has been pushing people toward conversational search. The groundwork is already there: Spotify already has an AI DJ that lets you chat while listening to music. Now users can ask questions to get answers about a particular podcast episode or its themes more broadly. They might already be doing this in chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Spotify doesn’t want them to leave the app.
所有这些都意味着平台上的内容会越来越多，而 Spotify 帮助用户筛选内容的方案依然是 AI。该公司正在为有声书和播客增加自然语言搜索功能，这类似于谷歌推动用户使用对话式搜索的做法。基础工作已经就绪：Spotify 已经拥有一个 AI DJ，让你在听音乐时可以进行交流。现在，用户可以提问以获取关于特定播客剧集或其主题的更广泛解答。用户或许已经在 ChatGPT 或 Gemini 等聊天机器人中做过这些事，但 Spotify 不希望他们离开自己的应用。
Spotify is trying hard to become an everything-audio app, but in that quest, it is filling itself with features users didn’t ask for and making it confusing and harder to navigate. The company is no longer focused solely on consumption — it’s actively nudging users to create content, too, even if it’s just for themselves. The risk is that this trades depth for breadth: The more time users spend making sense of a cluttered app, the less time they spend discovering and listening to content by other creators.
Spotify 正努力成为一款“音频万能”应用，但在这一追求中，它充斥着用户并未要求的功能，导致应用变得混乱且难以导航。该公司不再仅仅专注于内容消费——它还在积极推动用户创作内容，即使这些内容只是为了他们自己。风险在于，这是一种以深度换取广度的做法：用户花在理清杂乱应用上的时间越多，花在发现和收听其他创作者内容上的时间就越少。
This raises the question: Is Spotify deepening its competitive moat or diluting what made it essential? If users feel that the app has lost focus and isn’t surfacing the content they want, more of them may follow my colleague Amanda out the door — and take their listening time with them.
这引发了一个问题：Spotify 是在加深其竞争护城河，还是在稀释其核心价值？如果用户觉得这款应用失去了焦点，且无法呈现他们想要的内容，那么可能会有更多用户像我的同事 Amanda 一样选择离开——并带走他们的收听时间。