According to multiple reports from Axios and Bloomberg, Spotify filed a series of confidential IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of last year. In other words, the streaming giant is set to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, and plans to make its shares public in the first quarter of 2018.
The move could signal a huge financial windfall for Spotify’s private ownership group. A recent CNBC report speculated that the public offering could value the company up to $20 billion. This falls in line with a similar report offered by Reuters in December that pegged the company’s value at around $19 billion.
The IPO comes at a precarious moment in Spotify’s history. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the company had been hit with a $1.6 billion lawsuit by Wixen, the publishing company who handles the catalogs for big name artists like Tom Petty, Neil Young, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, and Rage Against The Machine, over unpaid royalties.
As late as the fall of 2017, Spotify reportedly had accumulated 140 million regular users. Even more staggering, they’ve also managed to count 60 million paid accounts amongst their subscriber base, dwarfing any and all competitors in the streaming arena.
