Spotify Ready For Its Close-up
• Spotify has officially filed for a public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The service intends to trade on the New York Stock Exchange using the”SPOT” symbol, and offer shares worth up to $1 billion.
As Variety reports, Spotify won’t be using the traditional IPO process for its public offering, which also means that the company won’t have a share opening price. Instead, it offered some guidance in its filing based on private share sales, which have ranged between $90.00 and $132.50 per share this year. Spotify also revealed that it had 159 million monthly active users and 71 million paying premium subscribers at the end of December. The company generated close to $5 billion in revenue in 2017, compared to $3.6 billion in 2016.
Other notes from Spotify’s SEC filing: 1) The company claims to have nearly twice as many paying subscribers as Apple Music; 2) Spotify says its users stream 25 hours of audio every month on average and claims 31% of all listening on Spotify now comes from playlists, up from less than 20% two years ago.
Spotify used much of its prospectus to highlight the positive impact it has had on the music industry overall. To that end, the company pointed out that by the end of 2017, it had paid more than $9.77 billion to rights holders. It also took credit for being a key part in reversing shrinking music industry revenues, which bottomed out in 2015, and continued to grow in 2016.
