Spotify IPO Expected To Be At $25 Billion

Spotify is set to debut as a publicly traded company today and the value of its IPO is expected to be anywhere from $20 billion to $25 billion. Shares to be sold are those held by private investors already and no new shares will be offered. This is expected to cause some volatility on trading day. Speaking of which, KISS bass guitarist Gene Simmons recently said that Spotify was not entirely to blame for artist woes.

The IPO valuation for Spotify was set by analysts that looked into the prospects of the app that has about 157 million users worldwide, The Guardian reports. It’s worth pointing out that not all of these users are paying for the service, with only about 71 million of them being premium subscribers.

Unfortunately, even with that many people paying for the music that Spotify is streaming for them, the company has not exactly been profitable. Much of this is due to the licensing agreement that it has with music labels, which take a huge chunk of the money that the app is making through its users. Even with this being the case, artists are still complaining that they are seeing almost none of this money.

Having pointed that out, Gene Simmons of the band KISS recently spoke with CNBC and said that if artists want to blame someone for not getting enough royalties from Spotify, they should blame the lawmakers. The fact of the matter is that current legislation simply don’t do enough to cover the needs of modern musicians and singers.

"At the end of the day the artists have gotten the rug pulled out from under them, and I'm shocked that legislators in Washington D.C. haven't taken the entire industry to task" Simmons griped. "Legislation is archaic and prehistoric. New artists are getting slaughtered because they're getting micro pennies out of a dollar."