One of the biggest forces in music business around the world, Tencent Music Entertainment are prepping their monumental IPO and have finally set a date for the event.

Tencent Music Entertainment have set the 18th of October as the date they hope to launch their IPO. Their public offering comes after Spotify successfully went public on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year and increased their value by over 50%. Since then many other music companies have looked into trading publicly.

Tencent will submit their IPO to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on September 7th for a launch on the public stock exchange on October 18th. TME has been valued at only slightly less than Spotify as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have underwritten the IPO at $30 billion, 1 billion less than Spotify’s market value of $31 billion. At least, this is according to sources in China.

Interestingly, late last year Spotify and Tencent swapped stock with each other, giving both company a 9% non-controlling stake in each other. Whilst technically rivals from different ends of the earth, the two companies seemed keen to invest in each other with Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek saying: “This transaction will allow both companies to benefit from the global growth of music streaming.” Tencent’s upcoming IPO will no doubt see an increase in value for Spotify in their shares, definitely if it lives up to it’s current valuation.

Tencent are the owners behind a massive section of music streaming services in China and further Asia. TME operate the incredibly popular QQ Music as well as services like Kugou and Kuwo. Each service was estimated to have over 100 million users in the first quarter of 2018 but QQ and Kugou both reported over 200 million users, according to iResearch.