INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Spotify has ended a test that required its family plan subscribers to verify their location, or risk losing accessing to its music
According to recent reports, the company sent out emails to its &Premium for Family& customers that asked them to confirm their locations
The idea here is that some customers may have been sharing Family Plans, even though they&re not related, as a means of paying less for
Spotify by splitting the plan support for multiple users
And Spotify wanted to bust them.
Spiegel Onlineand Quartzfirst reported this news on Thursday.
Of course, as these reports pointed out,
asking users to confirm a GPS location is a poor means of verification
Families often have members who live or work outside the home — they may live abroad, have divorced or separated parents, have kids in
college, travel for work or any other number of reasons.
But technically, these sorts of situations are prohibited by Spotify family plan
terms — the rules require all members to share a physical address
That rule hadn''t really been as strictly enforced before, so many didn''t realize they had broken it when they added members who don''t
live at home.
Customers were also uncomfortable with how Spotify wanted to verify their location — instead of entering a mailing address
for the main account, for instance, they were asked for their exact (GPS) location.
The emails also threatened that failure to verify the
account this way could cause them to lose access to the service.
Family plans are often abused by those who use them as a loophole for
For example, a few years ago, Amazon decided to cut down on Prime members sharing their benefits, because they found these were beingbroadly
shared outside immediate families
In its case, it limited sharing to two adults who could both authorize and use the payment cards on file, and allowed them to create other,
more limited profiles for the kids.
Spotify could have done something similar
It could have asked Family Plan adult subscribers to re-enter their payment card information to confirm their account, or it could have
designated select slots for child members with a different set of privileges to make sharing less appealing.
Maybe it will now reconsider
how verification works, given the customer backlash.
We understand the verification emails were only a small-scale test of a new system, not
something Spotify is rolling out to all users
The emails were sent out in only four of Spotify markets, including the United States
And the test only ran for a short time before Spotify
shut it down.
Reached for comment, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed this, saying:
Spotify is currently testing improvements to the user
experience of Premium for Family with small user groups in select markets
We are always testing new products and experiences at Spotify, but have no further news to share regarding this particular feature test at
