Spotify continues to maintain a major lead over its music streaming competitors and is now gearing for a public listing, which has caused them to make some significant changes to the board of directors. A couple trio of the company’s notable backers have decided to step down and make way for the onboarding of a quartet of high-profile individuals.
Sean Parker is well-recognized to all as the notorious entrepreneur-cum-investor who founded the digital music platform Napster when he was just 19 and joined Facebook as its first President to help it reach across the realms of this world. While the former is known to have been shut down due to retaliation by record labels, the latter saw him being ousted.
After the said stints, he decided it was time to jump back in the music business and picked-up 5 percent stake, along with a board seat in Spotify for close to $15 million. Now, it was seven years ago and Parker is now departing the board of directors, along with early investor Klaus Hommels. This development was first spotted by Swedish tech site Breakit.se, who claims to have got the info from documents filed with The Luxembourg Trade and Companies Register.
While this empties two seats at the table, Spotify is bulking up on their board of directors for the upcoming significant stretch. It is now adding four new influential executives, namely former Disney COO Tom Staggs; Padmasree Warrior, the U.S head for Chinese electric carmaker NextEV; a former YouTube product head Shishir Mehrotra; and Cristina Stenbeck, owner of Swedish investment firm Kinnevik. This falls in line with reports that had surfaced last month.
These four individuals will now be joining the existing board members, which include the music streaming giant’s founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, along with Ted Sarandos (Chief Content Officer for Netflix), Woody Marshall (General Partner and Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures), and Pär-Jörgen Pärsson (General Partner at Northzone). In an email statement, a Spotify spokesperson has confirmed to The Tech Portal that Sean Parker and Klaus Hommels have departed the board of directors, but they are also joined by Pär-Jörgen Parson. It has further been added that try remain investors, friends, and supporters of Spotify.
This is an important reshuffling for Spotify as the music streaming giant is placing the very first gear for kick-starting the procedure for its public listing early next year. But, reports suggest that the company has decided to opt for a direct listing on the NYSE rather a public offering on the market.
This means Spotify is neither going to define an exact IPO price for the shares nor will it be touring the globe to attract investors to purchase their shares. Everyone interested in their offering will have to pick up company stock from the open market when Spotify is finally live on the stock exchange.
