Spotify Wants $5 More a Month to Let Fans Remix Its Catalog With AI, Starting Around the Grammys

Spotify is preparing a paid feature that would let paying subscribers generate their own versions of songs with AI, turning a folk track into a dance record or making one artist appear to perform another's music, according to a Financial Times report citing people familiar with the plans.

The timing is aggressive. The FT says Spotify is targeting the first quarter of 2027 and could unveil the product around the Grammy Awards in February, and that the company is weighing an additional $4 to $5 a month on top of a Premium subscription. Spotify has publicly described the feature as a paid Premium add-on but has not announced a price or a launch date, and declined to comment on the report.

The licensing architecture is the real story. Spotify has signed feature-specific agreements with Universal Music Group, independent label group Merlin, publisher Kobalt and distributor Believe, whose deal also covers artists distributing through TuneCore. Talks with Sony Music and Warner Music are continuing. Even where a label has signed, individual artists have to opt in separately before their catalogs become remixable, a two-step consent structure the company has framed as the condition for launching at all.

The economics are designed to answer the industry's central objection to generative AI, which is that fan-made derivatives currently circulate without compensation. Under the reported plan, royalties from remixes would flow back to the original artists and songwriters, and plays of an authorized remix would count toward the original recording in Spotify's charts. The company is also working on how to place those versions in playlists, which is where discovery, and therefore money, actually happens.

This has been in motion for months. Spotify announced its first formal generative AI licensing agreement with Universal Music Group in May 2026, with both sides saying artists and songwriters would opt in and share revenue. Co-CEO Alex Norström described the principle in May as consent, credit and compensation. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström said on the company's second-quarter call that Spotify could move ahead without every major label on board, which matters because Sony and Warner have not announced deals for this feature.

Rivals are experimenting with the same territory from different directions. Universal has licensed its catalog to ElevenLabs for a fan remix platform, and Deezer launched a remix tool that does not use AI at all. For Spotify, the calculation is straightforward: a paid add-on raises average revenue per user without raising the base subscription price, and it converts a capability that listeners already get from unlicensed tools into a licensed, monetized, chart-counted product.

What this means: after two years in which labels treated generative audio mostly as a threat to be litigated, the first mainstream licensed consumer music generator is being built as a subscription tier rather than a standalone app. That is a meaningful shift in who controls the interface. If it works, the remix button becomes a revenue line for rights holders and a retention lever for Spotify; if the remaining label deals or artist opt-ins stall, the feature launches with a partial catalog and the unlicensed tools keep the demand.