The streaming music market continues to grow. Spotify, the streaming music service born in Sweden in 2008, could go public on Wall Street next fall. According to reports from Quartz magazine, the group would be in contact with some banks and will begin presenting its shares to investors between April and May.
Meanwhile, the service, which is valued at between 7 and 8 billion dollars, is starting to prepare the documents to be presented to the SEC, the American Consob. For some months Spotify has received credit lines from banks for 200 million dollars, a common move before an IPO: in 2013 the group recorded net losses of 58,7 million dollars on a turnover of 702 million dollars, compared to a loss of 81,62 million and revenues of 602 million in 2012.
The battle for supremacy in this sector is therefore becoming more and more intense. Spotify's rival service Pandora has led the industry in stealing users from Apple's iTunes, which recently entered the arena with the launch of iTunes Radio, an app widely referred to as Pandora's copycat. Even Apple, as reported by the American press a few days ago, is trying to enhance its streaming service to counter the growth of Spotify, and to introduce an iTunes app for Android, Google's operating system.
