Spotify, which declined to comment for this story, has seen widening losses throughout its growth. As the company goes public, can it save itself? Record industry's gain, Spotify's loss Spotify's turnaround of the music industry's fortunes, however, comes at the expense of ballooning losses. With Spotify leading the charge, that shift has revived the music industry after 15 years of atrophy. After decades of buying music outright, as we did in the era of CDs and digital downloads, we're increasingly paying flat fees for all-you-can-access tunes.

Spotify has grown into the world's biggest streaming music service, driving a larger, cultural shift in how we play and pay for music. Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek detailed the streaming music service's business at an investor day in March. 'Spotify has never been a normal kind of company,'ĭaniel Ek, the company's co-founder and chief executive, said in a blog post Monday. Instead, its shares will simply trade for whatever the investors think they're worth. That's because Spotify, which charges $10 a month for commercial-free music, isn't selling a heap of new shares to rake in money. Unlike with most multibillion-dollar IPOs, the founder didn't ring the opening bell. The Swedish company has taken an unusual tack in going public.

Although shares slid throughout the day to eventually close at $149.01, the debut values Spotify at $26.5 billion. The shares opened at $165.90 each, well above a 'reference price' of $132 the NYSE set Monday night. A little before noon ET, the music streaming service began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SPOT. On Tuesday, Spotify became a publicly traded company, every tech startup's milestone of adulthood. But it still has a long way to go before it comes into its own.