Spotify goes public this AM.
How much the shares will open & close at is anybody’s guess at this point? I personally think it could be a turbulent day for our big, green friends.
It’s a complicated and extremely savvy method of getting the stock on the public exchange and ultimately allowing their investors to start to cash out by trading their shares with other interested investors as they start to get in.
We’ve all seen and heard a lot of speculation but ultimately Spotify has played their hand pretty perfectly from this point. I remember when Spotify was just an urban myth. More than a handful of years back at Social Media Week, I was emceeing the Art and Culture Hub at the Red Bull Space and asked the panel their thoughts on Spotify coming to the US. The prominent DJ and indie label head Nick Catchdubs answered something along the lines of “Spotify is kind of like country music in that I keep hearing that it exists but haven’t seen any proof of it around these parts yet”.
Well they made good! What’s most exciting is that a music tech company is the talk of Wall Street. Finally, tech investors can feel safe putting money back into music again. And this rising tides has raised a lot of the ships.
I’m still a little surprised by this stat though, according to Verto Analytics’ Index of streaming-music usage, Apple Music has far fewer total users than Spotify, but Apple’s premium service boasted more active users for the month of February, with a 49.5m to Spotifys 47.7m with Pandora coming in at #3 with 36.8m monthly users. This is far the end of the streaming wars. Just a big milestone in the saga.
Anyway, it certainly will be an exciting week for Spotify as all eyes will be on the platform and the music tech industry overall should catch some halo effects.
P.S.: I’m now serving on the judge committee for The Telly Awards – and would like to remind you all that the deadline for submissions for the 49th Annual Awards is this Friday! Enter your work across across our expanded categories in Branded Content, Social Video and a slew of Animation categories, and Craft categories that reflect the unique constraints and opportunities of producing video for social platforms. Click here to enter!
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