Spotify, t
he world’s biggest streaming company filed papers for a direct listing with the New York Stock Exchange on the 28th March 2018. The Swedish firm declared that its 2017 revenue stood at €4.09bn compared with €2.95 billion a year earlier. Despite having twice as many subscribers as Apple Music, its nearest rival, the service continues to make a loss which widened to €378m in 2017 from €394m a year earlier. Financial experts estimate the value of the company at €16bn which is similar to the valuation of Snap, the owner of the photo-sharing app Snapchat, at its IPO (Initial Public Offering) a year ago. Spotify currently operates its service in more than 60 countries.
At present there is no HiRes service available and streams are in the Ogg Vorbis format at 96kbit/s for ‘Normal’ quality on mobile platforms, 160kbits for ‘High’ quality on mobile, desktop and the web player and 320kbit/s for ‘Extreme’ quality on all platforms except the web player which does not support Extreme quality.
