Spotify Might Be Eyeing An IPO

Swedish tech company Spotify may be preparing for an IPO. The online music streaming service advertised on LinkedIn and its own website for somebody who could help it satisfy U.S. SEC guidelines for financial reporting.

According to the job advertisement, the successful candidate would be an external reporting specialist who would, "prepare the company for SEC filing standards. Set up all reports necessary to be SEC compliant."

Meeting SEC standards for financial reporting is a complicated and painstaking task that often indicates a company’s desire to transform from a private company with relative few guidelines to a public company where regulatory guidelines are intense.

Spotify declined to comment on what if any plans it has for going public. It released a statement that said, "As Spotify grows and becomes a more mature company we are looking for people who can help us keep our financial reporting in order and up to global standards."

Spotify raised $250 million in a round of funding in November. As one of the world’s most richly capitalized start-ups, the company has an estimated value of $8 billion. Companies like Twitter and LinkedIn have market caps of $20 billion and $22 billion respectively but even at $8 billion, Spotify would be the hottest IPO since the Twitter offering.

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Spotify is a streaming music service but has a social media component making investors look at it as the next big social media stock.

But Spotify would enter the financial markets with a lot of competition. Pandora and iTunes Radio are its main competition on the music side and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all wrangle for investor dollars on the social media side.

With Spotify quickly disrupting the music streaming space, some investors are wondering if Pandora will be able to survive the rapidly changing music streaming landscape.

For now, there are no official plans for a Spotify IPO and if the company is just now hiring for somebody to help with its financial reporting, any announcement would likely be well into the future.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Tim Parker was long Apple.