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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.

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Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
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Dan Ackerman
Spotify
Screenshot by Dan Ackerman/CNET

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.