Music streaming unicorn Spotify is planning to go public later this year -- and compete in one of the most notoriously difficult industries in the market. Listen to this Industry Focus: Tech clip to hear more about the biggest challenges that Spotify is going to have to face up against, how it might be more successful than Pandora (NYSE: P), some of the most promising ways that Spotify could defend against competition, and more.

A full transcript follows the video.

More From The Motley Fool

• 3 Growth Stocks at Deep-Value Prices

• 5 Expected Social Security Changes in 2018

• 6 Years Later, 6 Charts That Show How Far Apple, Inc. Has Come Since Steve Jobs' Passing

• 10 Best Stocks to Buy Today

• The $16,122 Social Security Bonus You Cannot Afford to Miss

• Bitcoin's Biggest Competitor Isn't Ethereum -- It's This

This video was recorded on March 9, 2017.

Dylan Lewis: What do we see with Spotify's business right now? What are the risks we're worried about? And maybe, what are some of the opportunities? We haven't talked too much about the competitive pressures, but one of the things that has me most worried about this company as it currently exists is, there's not a lot of pricing power in the streaming music space, and there's also not a lot of cost control, either.

Evan Niu: Right. And between the two of those, you get squeezed pretty hard. On one hand, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) Music is humongous, and Apple does not need to make any money on this. $10 a month is kind of table stakes right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if going forward, that comes down even further, just through competition. Because like you said, if it's commoditized enough, these companies have to compete on price.

I do think Spotify has other ways that they can differentiate themselves. For example, they're ubiquitous. They have so many third-party integrations, from gaming consoles to phones to cars to high-end audio receiver. Spotify is literally everywhere. It's also cross-platform. While Apple is only targeting iOS and its own userbase, Spotify targets everyone. And that scale really gives them the amount of user data that they need to be able to personalize these things and target these things we were just talking about. So, I do think they have some advantages.

Lewis: Yeah. It's certainly a business that, in five years, could look a little different than it currently does. For the sake of people who currently owns shares, I kind of hope it does, because we've seen a lot of companies struggle to make it work in the music streaming space. I think Pandora is probably the biggest one. We've talked about some of the more music industry relevant things that Spotify could do. Those are things that Pandora tried to do. They acquired Ticketfly and tried to branch more into the event marketing side and ticket fulfillment side of that business, and then they later divested those assets.