Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. is planning to spin off its online music streaming business with an initial public offering in the U.S.

Bloomberg Sunday cited people familiar with the matter as saying that the move is designed to allow American investors to bet on the growing popularity of music streaming services in China. Last year, the country cracked the world’s top 10 markets for music with $292.3 million in revenue, according to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry figures.

The move comes at a time when streaming services are seeing a resurgence in general, with companies such as Spotify Technology SA helping industry sales grow at their fastest rate since the 1990s, Bloomberg added. The U.S. saw its recorded music sales grow last year by 17 percent, to $8.5 billion, with streaming services accounting for about two-thirds of those sales, according to Recording Industry Association of America statistics. For much of the early 2000s, the music industry was blighted by piracy and illegal downloads that led to years of declining sales.

Tencent, which is the largest gaming and social media firm in China, said it was planning to list its Tencent Music Entertainment Group subsidiary in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange Sunday. Tencent had previously filed for an IPO for its online reading business, China Literature Ltd., at the same exchange.

“The terms of the Proposed Spin-off, including offering size, price range and assured entitlement of Tencent Music securities for shareholders of the Company, have not yet been finalized,” the company said in its filing Sunday. The spinoff is subject to approval of “relevant authorities” as well as the boards of Tencent and its music unit.

TME’s IPO could raise at least $1 billion, giving the company a valuation of $30 billion-plus, according to other reports. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are expected to underwrite the IPO, Bloomberg’s sources said.

Tencent owns a massive content empire, with properties including the vastly popular WeChat messaging app and various games and music apps. The last includes the QQ Music brand in Hong Kong and Kuwo and KuGou in China, which Bloomberg said are helping western artists to reach new audiences in that country.

“As people spend more time on their smart devices, entertainment is a crucial factor,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “Being in the music business is even more important for internet companies, as it reveals the preferences of their consumers, which enables numerous ways of monetizing data exhaust for other commercial activities.”

Tencent also owns a stake in Spotify, having bought up 9.1 percent of its shares in December, about a quarter of which are directly owned by TME. As part of that deal, which was described at the time as an “equity swap,” Spotify took a noncontrolling equity interest of about 9 percent in TME, even though the two firms are increasingly competing against one another in markets such as Southeast Asia.

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