In March this year Spotify filed for a direct listing (Spotify takes the first step to going public) on the New York Stock Exchange. The Swedish owned company made its stock market debut (4th April 2018) with a market capitalisation of $30bn although that dropped to $27bn after early profit taking.
In 2017 Spotify generated $4.99bn in revenue, up from $3.6bn in 2016. Its number of paid subscribers grew by 46% with monthly active users (MAUs) up 29%. Despite the impressive growth the company was loss-making going $1.5bn into the red, although $1bn of this was due to a non-recurring expense with Chinese internet group Tencent. Spotify’s operating loss widened from $426m in 2016 to $461m in 2017.
Spotify has 159 million monthly active users and 71 million paying premium subscribers.
Currently Spotify only offers a maximum of Standard Quality – 320kbits/s (see Music Streaming Audio Quality) but there are rumours that they will be offering a CD Quality service in the future.
