Spotify has come under fire from users after announcing another big crackdown on the use of family plans to give multiple people cheaper accounts.
The Spotify family plan grants six premium accounts for the price of £17.99, or $16.99. Considering the equivalent of that in regular accounts would be closer to £60 or $70, it’s only natural that groups of people looking to save money would gravitate towards this plan.
However, Spotify has constantly tried to clamp down on people abusing the system, by putting checks in place to make sure the people using the premium accounts really are in the same family.
The latest of these checks apparently involves asking members of family plans to send proof that they live at the same address. What’s more, Spotify users are claiming that they’ll be kicked off of the plan within a week if they don’t send confirmation, and that they’d be banned from using another plan for a year if this happens.
Spotify family plan users slam new security on account sharing
Several users argued that this kind of crackdown would affect actual families using the system, not just the people abusing the cheaper accounts.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
“What if a family member lives away from the family?” One commenter asked. “What if they’re a uni student? Spotify what are you doing?”
Other viewers suggested that the crackdown would be easy to get around, as Spotify won’t be able to manually check every family is correct: “Just say you all live at the same address. What are they going to do, come around and check?”
Last year, Spotify made headlines for hiking the premium price upwards for users in America. It looks like this crackdown is part of a similar trend of refocusing how the site makes money.