Spotify reportedly files for IPO
But the company may be planning skip a traditional offering in favor of a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Spotify , the music streaming service based in Stockholm, Sweden, filed confidential IPO documents with the SEC in December, according to an initial report on Wednesday from Axios that was confirmed by Bloomberg.
The wrinkle is that this may be a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange, rather than a traditional public offering. That's a rarely used process that avoids some of the rules and costs associated with a standard IPO, but also offers less hype and potentially less buzz. This direction was hinted at as far back as spring 2017.
The company may be looking at going public in the first quarter of 2018, but was also just hit with a $1.6 billion lawsuit from a major music publisher. Spotify declined to comment on the SEC filing.