If you share your Spotify Family Plan with family or friends, you may soon have to verify they live with you or face a year-long ban from joining other Family Plans.
The crux of the issue is with the music streamer’s Family Plan, which allows subscribers to split their subscription with up to “6 family members who live together,” according to Spotify’s website (emphasis ours).
I highlight that “live together” part because that’s how Spotify is cracking down on plan sharing. It’s forcing people to scan a QR code that’s only available on the plan manager’s phone as a way to verify whether plan members live together. And no, you can’t just screenshot the code — it changes dynamically, and it also uses Bluetooth to check if the devices are close to each other.
Plan members who fail to verify within seven days will be prohibited from joining a different Family or Duo plan for 12 months, though (naturally) Spotify will let them sign up for their own Premium plan.
There have already been several reports of this happening to people (though as a Family Plan subscriber myself, I haven’t seen it happen yet), plus Spotify has a support page detailing the QR code verification process.
But if that wasn’t enough, Spotify’s co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on the company’s Q3 earnings call that the company is cracking down on Family Plan sharing, though he calls it a “routine improvement.”
Norström explained on the call that Family Plan makes up a “pretty significant proportion of [Spotify’s] subscriber base,” which is why the company is now trying to patch holes in its verification process.
“As such, it is important for us to just make sure over time that we improve the verification methods that we have. There are certainly ways, over time, to find holes around it. As that happens, we figure out how to improve it over time,” Norström said.
The thing is, this isn’t an “improvement” at all. Frankly, it sucks. The whole point of a family plan like this is to have a group of people bundled together under one discounted subscription. It shouldn’t matter that members use it in different locations as long as they’re paying for it.
It sucked when Netflix did it, it sucked when Disney+ did it, and it sucks now.
Source: Spotify, Reddit Via: The Verge, TechCrunch
News 
Streaming 
Streaming 
News 