Spotify is moving its U.S. headquarters to 4 World Trade Center in Manhattan, the company announced on Wednesday. The music streaming service will be leasing approximately 400,000 square feet for its new offices which will allow it to create 1,000 new jobs in the area. Spotify said it’s planning to relocate and add new jobs by early 2018, though no specific dates accompanied that announcement. The firm is moving to lower Manhattan from the Chelsea neighborhood where it’s currently employing 832 people. All of those jobs will be saved during this move, New York governor Andrew Cuomo revealed during a press conference on Wednesday.
Spotify admitted it was thinking about moving its U.S. headquarters to another city but ultimately decided to stay in New York which earned the company praise from Downtown Alliance, one of the most prominent business improvement organizations in the city. Empire State Development will also approve approximately $11 million in rent reduction credits to Spotify over the next ten years. The move came as a surprise to some industry watchers seeing how Spotify is still struggling to become profitable even after its service spent almost a decade on the market. Due to that state of affairs, some analysts were predicting that the Swedish streaming service will opt to relocate its U.S. headquarters to a less expensive location. However, recent reports suggest that the company is finally turning things around and could become profitable as early as this year.
The company’s new U.S. headquarters and improving business results may finally provide Spotify with an ideal opportunity to go public. While the Stockholm-based service never publicly announced any intentions to file for an initial public offering (IPO), doing so while it’s on an upswing may prove to be a wise move in the long-term. As things stand right now, over 40 percent of Spotify’s subscribers are paying customers and the service is allegedly recording higher user growth rates than Apple Music is, but that’s mostly due to its expansion efforts which cost a lot of money to conduct. So, if Spotify wants to continue fueling its growth and avoid turning to private funding yet again, going public might be the best bet for the company.