Spotify has confirmed it is checking whether people on its Family plan really live together. On its third-quarter earnings call, co-chief executive Alex Norström called the new QR code verification "a routine improvement" rather than a crackdown, TechCrunch and The Verge reported on 22 October.
How the check works
- The app prompts Family plan members to verify they live with the plan manager
- The member scans a QR code shown on the plan manager's phone, which refreshes every few seconds
- Members have seven days after the notification to complete it
- Anyone who misses the window cannot join another Family or Duo plan for 12 months and has to move to an individual plan they pay for themselves
The seven-day window is the catch. An adult child at university or a sibling in another city has to be in the same room as the plan manager's phone to stay on the plan.
Why Spotify is doing it
"Family Plan has existed for a long while. It has been around for, I think it is now close to 12, 13 years in Spotify history, and it makes up a pretty significant proportion of our subscriber base," Norström said. "There are certainly ways, over time, to find holes around it. As that happens, we figure out how to improve it over time." He said the work has no end date.
The aim, TechCrunch notes, is to push people who split a Family plan across households into paying for their own Premium plans. Spotify has tried before: in 2018 it tested asking members to confirm their GPS location, then ended the test. Its terms have long required members to share one address.
Netflix and HBO Max have run their own password-sharing crackdowns, and The Verge has reported that Netflix subscriptions rose after Netflix's.
