Spotify has led the way in terms of user engagement. They recently rolled out an innovative voice-request feature for their AI DJ, currently limited to Premium subscribers. Introduced in late May 2025, this new functionality lets users chat directly with the AI DJ inside the app. With the push of a button, subscribers can now interact like never before with all of the platform’s music offerings.
In the second quarter this year, Spotify announced it had 276 million paid subscribers, a 12% increase from the same time last year. The platform claimed to have 696 million monthly active users at this time. Despite all that growth of subscriber adds, Spotify took a little bit of a financial bath. It reported a net income that came in at over $500 million short of its missed revenue projections. In response, its stock crashed 10%. This decline was exacerbated by CEO Daniel Ek’s candid remarks concerning his dissatisfaction with the company’s advertising business.
Spotify’s transformation moves well beyond simply using AI technology to predict what music people will want to listen to next. According to Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s Chief Research and Development Officer, the new AI DJ feature will be beneficial. It allows the business to amass precious voice data and learn directly from users.
“You can think of it as us getting a new dataset,” – Gustav Söderström
This new data is incredibly important for making a seamless user experience. The deal presents some thrilling new opportunities for Spotify itself to expand its functionality. Söderström described this data collection as extremely quick, and the ways in which it could shape the platform’s course development.
“And that’s completely new to us, and it’s a very, very valuable data set that we are collecting very quickly,” – Gustav Söderström
As Spotify moves forward, their obsession with voice interaction is undeniably going to change. Söderström noted, “You can already write to Spotify, talk to Spotify. You’re just going to see that expand.” That points to the possibility that users can look forward to a whole lot more interactivity down the road that might reshape what they’re listening to entirely.