On May 22, 2026, TechCrunch published an article by Ivan Mehta titled Spotify’s AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want. I preface my thoughts by noting that I have never used Spotify—or is it now SpotifAI?—and nothing I have read or heard about it, including Mr. Mehta’s article, has made me think that I am missing out. While Mr. Mehta’s article did not inspire me to sign up for a Spotify subscription plan and start running Google Play Services on my phone so I can use the app, it did challenge my assumptions about the true nature of Spotify.
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.
I had previously been aware that Spotify had an AI music problem. But I was not previously aware that Spotify was involved in other AI projects. One example in Mr. Mehta’s article caught my attention:
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.
What in the world? Mr. Mehta linked to a report he wrote on the subject of Spotify’s podcast generation technology (see the link in the above quote), so I decided against my better judgment to dig deeper.
Today, the company released the ability for users to explore a topic by creating a podcast about it. Spotify is also adding personal context to this podcast-generation tool. And, because in 2026 companies can’t refrain from adding agents to their apps, the new Studio app has an agent that can browse the web and fetch personal information to create a personal podcast.
My head hurt when I read that. It hurt even more when I learned that some Google product called “NotebookLM” had apparently “started popularizing podcast generation based on selected source material a few years ago.” Add this to the list of things I miss out on as a result of using the internet correctly. I am not a podcast person and recently gave a “thumbs down” to an argument extolling the benefits of listening to podcasts on walks. I am willing to grant that I am sure there are some pleasant and useful podcasts out there, provided they are not seeped in the prevailing podcast culture. But I am confident–even without having tested my theory to confirm–that Spotify’s and Google’s AI-generated podcast episodes are unlikely to fall on the positive side of the podcast ledger.
I doubt that most people who have passing familiarity with my work were surprised to find that I am not subscribing to Spotify so I can generate podcasts. But I do have one surprise in store: Spotify not only anticipated my sentiment, but has already rolled out a fix. I quote from the first article of Mr. Mehta’s that I shared:
Now users can ask questions to get answers about a particular podcast episode or its themes more broadly.
I quote from the link Mr. Mehta provided to one of his earlier stories explaining this feature:
With this, users can ask questions about the episode they are listening to or a concept mentioned in the podcast to get answers.
I had a eureka moment when I read this. Imagine that a Spotify consumer wants to consume–to borrow Mr. Mehta’s example — a podcast explaining economics in five minutes. Because the Spotify consumer can prompt Spotify to create content for his or her consumption, he or she has no need to consume content outside of Spotify. So the Spotify consumer asks the Spotify chatbot to create a five-minute economics explainer podcast for his or her consumption. Spotify obliges and produces an original AI-generated podcast explaining economics in five minutes. But the Spotify user then wonders whether he or she really has five minutes to consume a podcast about economics. Perhaps this user is concerned about failing to optimize by spending too much of his or her time on podcast consumption. The user/consumer then has an idea. He or she “can ask questions about the episode” and then receive an AI summary of the key points in the daunting five-minute AI-generated podcast. Next step: Ask Spotify to create a podcast about achieving immense productivity gains by creating AI summaries of AI podcasts.
This is all well and good but if asked for my opinion, I would prefer to be able to buy RAM.
