Spotify are still reigning supreme and more and more people are signing up to the music streaming service every month as they approach a massive milestone.

Spotify’s latest earnings report reveals some massive number growth for the leading music streaming service. Their new report shows that by the end of 2018’s third quarter, September 30th, Spotify had 191 million total users counting both free and Premium. This puts them only 9 million away from the monumental milestone of 200 million.

For Spotify’s third quarter this year their average monthly users grew an incredible amount of over a quarter, seeing 28% growth on the year before. Their reports show that whilst established markets like Europe and the US are still growing all the time, it’s emerging markets like regions of Latin America that are seeing the most significant growth.

Premium subscribers made up 87 million of those users, up 4 million from the second quarter of 2018 and a phenomenal 40% increase from the year before. Ad-supported users made up the other 109 million which is a 20% increase year-on-year. It’s amazing to see that Premium subscribers are growing so much quicker than free users, and even almost matching the number of those listening with ads.

Spotify’s user base has always been made of up majority free users though their aim is to get people paying for music streaming. Spotify say that their free streaming tier is there to get people into the platform and the possibilities of music streaming and enticing them into Premium subscriptions once they’re sold on the platform. In the past few years Spotify have been doubling down on their efforts to get people moving on to Premium and clearly it’s having an effect.

Spotify have recently noted that people are taking advantage of their family plans by signing up to the vastly cheaper plan and sharing it between friends rather than one household. As a family plan costs $14.99 and can have up to 6 different users on it, it’s a far better deal than their single subscription costing $9.99. Spotify have begun identifying users who are taking advantage of the offer.

Spotify said in their report: “We continue to work to identify and remove users that we consider to be “fake” from our reported metrics. This includes, but is not limited to, bots and other users who aim to manipulate stream counts for purposes of royalty calculations. Such users are removed from our metrics in a timely fashion once they are discovered. However, some such users remain in our reported metrics because of the limitations of our ability to identify their accounts.”