Spotify is the biggest music streaming company out there, and many investors are eager to get in on the action when and if it eventually goes public.
In this clip from Industry Focus: Tech, Motley Fool analysts explain what we know about Spotify's financials, when it might go public, and why all the reports and speculation we have so far point toward Spotify going public with a direct offering instead of working with investment bankers and raising capital.
A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on Dec. 8, 2017.
Dylan Lewis: The piece of yours on the site that I saw that got me thinking along this line was some comments that were made by Jimmy Iovine, the Apple Music chief, about the music streaming space, specifically Spotify.
Evan Niu: Yeah, he was more or less suggesting that they're in trouble because the streaming music business is not really a great stand-alone business. I've stressed this in articles before, there's lots of industries that just aren't great businesses, and sometimes they can be better off served by larger companies that have this as a side business that they don't need to rely on for profits. Spotify is a stand-alone pure play on music streaming, and the economics of music streaming just aren't great. It's really hard to build a stand-alone business on this, even though Spotify is huge and by far the most popular paid streaming service in the world. So, they're definitely doing very well at executing, but if the financials don't look great, there's not much you can do if the economics just aren't there.
Lewis: And we're going to talk about the numbers there. You look at the user growth that they've shown and some of the top line growth that they've shown, it's very tempting. This is one of those companies that has been the subject of rampant speculation, I think going back even to 2015, about when they will go public. Hopefully, on this show, we might ease investors' gumption or enthusiasm about this company, because I think you and I both see a business that's going to struggle long-term. For folks who aren't super familiar with Spotify, it's a music streaming platform. They offer both an ad-supported and premium account model. The premium accounts cost $9.99-14.99 a month. That catalog that they offered gives you access to tens of millions of songs. If you have a premium account, you can download them and listen to them offline on your device as well. Recent insider private trades have valued the company around $16 billion. I've seen that, were they to go public at some point in 2018, which seems pretty likely, they would be going public at some valuation around $20 billion or so. Looking at the financials that we have for them, we were lucky enough to get something, looking back at 2016, they put up about $3 billion in revenue. Looking at some of the price to sales figures that we've seen in the past year or so for some of these companies going public, not crazy at that valuation, but certainly a little bit rich, Evan.