The man who helped make Netflix a public company is joining the Spotify team.
The streaming service tapped Barry McCarthy, the former chief financial officer of Netflix, as its new head of finance. He starts on July 6.
“Barry has been on the board of Spotify for the past year or so,” Graham James, a Spotify spokesman, told The Huffington Post in an email.
Asked if hiring McCarthy is a sign the company may be planning to go public, James declined to comment.
Spotify may be ripe for an initial public offering. The service boasts more than 75 million active users, with over 20 million paying subscribers. The company earned $1.3 billion in revenue last year, up 45 percent over the previous year, according to documents filed in Luxembourg, where Spotify’s parent company is registered, and made public in May.
“Would it make sense at some point that Spotify would go public? Absolutely,” Dan Rayburn, a streaming analyst and executive vice president of the industry news site StreamingMedia.com, told HuffPost. “They have enough subscribers and enough revenue.”
But there's also stiff new competition for the company. Apple announced plans earlier this month to launch a streaming service called Apple Music, which some speculate could be a serious blow to Spotify. Selling shares of the company to investors could provide Spotify with the financial runway needed to bulk up its service ahead of a showdown with the world’s most valuable company.