One of the world's most popular online music streaming platform, Spotify, has announced to the world they are going public. Spotify placed the decision to become a public company by filing it to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and they are taking an unconventional way.

Unlike what other company would do, which is Initial Public Offering (IPO), Spotify chose to go for Direct Public Offering (DPO). This enables them to raise capital directly without needing to go through any middleman - investment banking firm or broke dealers.

Spotify earned the world's attention after study shows they are now worth more than the whole US Music Industry. The valuation done for both industry, shows Spotify is estimated to be worth US$8.4 billion compared to US Music Industry, which stand at US$6.972 billion only in 2014. The number has doubled since then after private trades in the platform shared it valued at US$16 billion for 2017.

Spotify claimed they now have 159 million active users monthly and 71 million are subscribing to their premium plan across 61 countries, boasting high potential to win against their biggest and closest competitor, Apple Music.

While Apple Music earned their users by introducing it as built-in app for Apple users, Spotify is a third party music application which depends on users' choice whether to download it or not. Despite that, they are still able to accumulate a high number of subscribers. 

Study shows the mobile traffic across the world especially Southeast Asia will continuously increase without any sign of slowing down soon. This is a great news for investors as it helps to picture clearer on Spotify potential to grow more in the industry and raise the capital needed by the music platform.

However, Spotify reported a huge loss of US$601 million last year despite the increasing numbers of users subscription and new customers. They also faced some issues on copyright of the musics with record labels.  Not to mention the copyright lawsuits that need to be settle.

It's certainly will be interesting to anticipate on Spotify public listing performance, which will be listed under the stock ticker - "SPOT".

This article is originally written by Whitney Mato from iPrice Group