100m of Spotify’s 217m users are now Premium subscribers

Scandanavian music streaming service Spotify is now used by 217-million people globally, of which around 100-million pay for Premium access to the service. This after the company released its Q1 2019 financial figures.

Notably, that’s an increase of 26% year-on-year.

Around two million of those users stem from India. Incredible, considering that the serviced launch in the subcontinent in February.

Premium users are up by 32% year-on-year, a better growth spurt than predicted.

“Outperformance was driven by a better than plan promotion in the US and Canada and continued strong growth in Family Plan,” it explained in its investor report.

It also cited a Google Home Mini promotion which spread to the UK and France, a partnership with video streaming service Hulu, as well as the debut of the Samsung Galaxy S10, which came preloaded with Spotify.

Despite this, Spotify hasn’t made any cash this quarter. It it dropped €142-million profits in Q1 2019, but this is fairly low considering it lost nearly three times as much in the previous quarter. Nevertheless, ad revenue is improving, up 24% year-over-year.

“In April of last year we officially unveiled a new Ad-Supported experience on Spotify. The updated user experience provided greater consumer control and an increased focus on curation and personalization. The net result has been a 12% increase in Content Hours per MAU across our free tier. This means accelerating growth in ad inventory, which should mean stronger Ad-Supported revenue growth,” the company added.

Revenue is up too though, if only slightly over the previous quarter, to €1.511-billion.

The company still believes that it’ll rack up 265-million users by the end of the year, but will it be able to turn a profit?

Feature image: Spotify