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Today was the first day the public could begin buying and selling Spotify stock under the symbol SPOT. The reference price, announced Monday evening was $132, which is what some recent private trades were priced at.

Prices briefly touched $169 at the opening bill before slipping to $149.01 at close, putting Spotify's market value at $26 billion dollars. While the closing price was well off from the opening the stock was still trading up 12% from the reference price.

Spotify was estimated to be worth around $8 billion in 2015 and then a year later in 2016 the Swedish music streaming company was said to be worth around $20 billion. Tripling in value in just three years is no small feat!

Its worth noting this means Spotify is already as valuable as Snap Inc's Snapchat (NASDAQ:SNAP) and is even worth more than Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ:HPE) , Sirius XM (NASDAQ:SIRI) , and General Mills (NYSE:GIS).

Today's events offered a rare glimpse at a direct sale public listing in which no new capital was raised by the issuance of new shares; instead, all existing shares that were available were sold by employees and early investors.

Investors were slightly worried about trading becoming volatile due to the nature of the listing - no major bank was underwriting the stock and thus no real price floor would exist. Ahead of the listing on the US's New York Stock Exchange the found and chief executive Daniel Elk tried to set a calm tone for today's trading session:

"As I mentioned during our Investor Day, our focus isn't on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term."

Spotify is the world's largest music streaming platform by far with over 159 million active streamers including 71 million paying premium subscribers. Apple Music is their nearest competitor and its not even close - Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) enjoys just 36 million subscribers.

While Spotify had a reasonably positive day on Wall Street they will continue to work on restructuring their cost model. Despite massive revenues of over $5 billion in 2017 Spotify still managed to operate at a loss of roughly $1.5 billion last year. Spotify has been reported to have recently renegotiated its major cost component of its service which is its contract deals with the major record labels to whom a large percentage of its revenue is diverted to.