Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Spotify shipped more than 50 new app features and changes last year, and it confirmed this week AI is handling major app development.
- The company’s co-CEO revealed its top developers haven’t written a line of code since last year thanks to a Claude Code-powered workflow.
- Spotify teased the possibility of using its large collection of music data to power other LLM-like features in the future.
Spotify is cramming artificial intelligence features in its music streaming app while simultaneously hiking subscription prices, but that’s not all. The company revealed this week in an earnings call that AI has been powering Spotify app development in recent months, as reported by TechCrunch. In a shocking admission, co-CEO Gustav Söderström said that Spotify’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December.” Spotify describes its internal AI coding system as being capable of “accelerating” development.
That system is called “Honk,” per the report, and it uses Claude Code for remote AI-powered development and deployment. In one example, Söderström explained Spotify engineers can use Slack to ask Claude Code to create a new feature or fix a problem affecting the app. Claude Code then completes the request and sends the updated Spotify app version to the engineer’s phone via Slack. From there, the Spotify engineer can merge the AI code with the production version of the app.
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Spotify says this AI coding system is speeding up development “tremendously.” It’s only the beginning for AI development at Spotify, according to Söderström. The same goes for user-facing AI tools. The company teased the possibility of Spotify building an LLM-like dataset with an abundance of music knowledge.
“This is a dataset that we are building right now that no one else is really building. It does not exist at this scale,” Söderström said on the call. “And we see it improving every time we retrain our models.”
Spotify’s boastful description of its AI development workflows comes just one month after the company hiked subscription prices for US users. It raised the cost of the Spotify Premium Individual to $12.99 per month, making it one of the most expensive music streamers on the market. At the time, Spotify said the price changes help the company “keep delivering a great experience.” Except by Spotify’s own admission, Claude Code and AI-accelerated development have been driving the app’s experience since December.
The Spotify app’s rapidly expanding feature set, which will include an in-app bookstore later this year, may be pushing customers away from the platform. On the earnings call, Spotify noted that it rolled out over 50 features and tweaks to its app last year. Users frustrated with the app’s bloated feel and AI features might not be thrilled to hear that artificial intelligence is partly to blame for app development itself.
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