Era of Agents: what about the Spotify model? Yes, maybe, who knows

In the era of agents, most consumer apps will become skills. And the ways to monetize them are subscriptions — we already discussed that — and ads, which are a bit tricky and risky with LLMs, and we discussed that as well.

The third way is the most exciting one, and I really believe it’s something new that was not possible previously. It’s micropayments: you get paid whenever an agent decides to use your skill.

In one of the previous videos I discussed this idea of micropayments, and it got enabled recently. First of all by blockchain — instantaneous transactions, and nearly zero cost transactions. Second, by the recent advancement in LLMs and agents and delegation. It just requires this kind of on-demand microtransactions.

You cannot manage thousands of subscriptions. It’s a pain. Sometimes you need to make this call, sometimes you need to make this task — it’s just not scalable. You cannot manage it anymore. You have to keep it flexible, relax it a bit. So your agent will have an allowance, and it will keep using that allowance.

But moreover — we discussed that the agent is becoming the execution layer, the execution environment for your skills, for your apps. And as a result, whoever runs the agent, the platform, is very likely to pay you. They will charge the users directly, and they’re likely to pay you part of that transaction, to share this profit with you whenever your skill is being called, is being used.

I believe this is something new. That’s probably closer to the Spotify model: they charge the users directly, but then the artist who created the content gets some part of that profit. So with skills, we get this model working for software as well. That’s what software will become in the future.