Music streaming company Spotify Technologies SA finally went public today on a positive note, with initial share trades leaping 26 percent ahead of their starting price in early trading.

Spotify launched on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SPOT with a reference price of $132 per share, putting the company’s valuation at about $23.5 billion. The actual first trade came in at $165.90 per share, with a total of 5.6 million shares exchanged.

But investors either lost interest or took some profits by day’s end, as shares closed up 13 percent from the reference price, to $149.01. That was down 10 percent from the initial trading price. Still, the IPO was the seventh-largest ever in technology at a market capitalization of $26.5 billion, according to Dealogic LLC.

Spotify’s first trade actually did not take place until about 12:45 p.m. EDT today, more than three hours after the opening bell, breaking the record set by Alibaba for the latest first trade in NYSE history.

One explanation for Spotify’s late start could be the somewhat unusual path that it took to go public, which may have made investors uncertain as to how they should handle Spotify’s opening day. Rather than taking the traditional IPO route, Spotify instead filed what is known as a direct listing, which allows existing shareholders to list their shares directly without going through an underwriter. Spotify is the largest company to have ever taken a direct listing, and it is the first to do so on the NYSE.

“Spotify is not raising capital, and our shareholders and employees have been free to buy and sell our stock for years,” Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek (pictured) said in a blog post Monday. “So while tomorrow puts us on a bigger stage, it doesn’t change who we are, what we are about, or how we operate.”

Ek added: “Normally, companies don’t pursue a direct listing. While I appreciate that this path makes sense for most, Spotify has never been a normal kind of company. 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.”

Some observers like the way Spotify went public. “I think it is a better way to finding what the price of the stock should be,” Box Inc. Chief Executive Aaron Levie told SiliconANGLE today. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in the process of going public. Because it’s such a one-off, it’s hard to know if a pattern will emerge. But it would be pretty cool if we saw it again.”

Spotify’s growth has been one of the company’s most important assets, and Spotify claimed in its filings that it is “double the scale” of Apple Music, with more than 159 million monthly active users and more than 79 million premium subscribers as of the end of 2017. User growth has played a significant role in share values for companies like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., and investors will likely keep a close eye on Spotify’s numbers and watch for any signs that its growth might be stalling.

Revenue is also a key factor in determining share values, and this is an area where Spotify will have a lot to prove. The company revealed in its offering paperwork that it suffered a net loss of more than $1.5 billion on total revenue of about $5 billion. However, a majority of Spotify’s net loss was the result of $1 billion in convertible debt that it raised in 2016 from Tencent Holdings Ltd., which agreed to not transfer its shares for a period of three years.

There has been a surge of tech IPOs over the last few months, and there are several major companies that have either already filed their paperwork or are rumored to be filing soon. Cloud storage company Dropbox Inc. went public last week, the same day that Pivotal Software Inc. filed the paperwork for its own IPO. DocuSign Inc. also filed for an IPO less than a week later, and just yesterday tech education startup Pluralsight LLC filed as well.

“It’s very clear that we’re now in the real wave of IPOs,” Levie said.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Spotify