Spotify's AI bet: more of everything, less of what you want | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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. 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. Now Spotify has signed a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) that allows fans to create AI covers