Spotify confirms Family Plan crackdown, but calls it a ‘routine improvement’

Spotify confirmed the reports of its crackdown connected Family Plan sharing during its third-quarter telephone with investors, calling its caller method “a regular improvement” to its existing verification tools.

Over the past respective days, reports had surfaced indicating that Spotify was rolling retired a “QR codification verification” method, wherever the app would punctual members connected its Family Plan to verify they lived with the program manager by scanning a QR code. This codification appears connected the program manager’s phone, which the program subordinate past needs to scan with their ain phone, according to Spotify’s enactment documentation.

Plan members person 7 days to implicit the QR codification aft getting a notification, which means they could beryllium retired of luck if they unrecorded extracurricular the location and aren’t readying a instrumentality sojourn anytime soon. If the verification model is missed, they won’t beryllium capable to articulation different Family oregon Duo program for 12 months, but would alternatively person to displacement to an idiosyncratic program that they wage for themselves.

The determination is meant to boost subscriptions to Spotify’s profitable Premium plans, alternatively than allowing big children oregon friends who unrecorded isolated from gaming the strategy to get a cheaper program by splitting a Family Plan subscription.

During the net call, an capitalist asked a question astir the crackdown and what it means, but Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström downplayed the change, calling it a “routine improvement,” not a “crackdown.”

“Family Plan has existed for a agelong while. It has been astir for, I deliberation it is present adjacent to 12, 13 years successful Spotify history, and it makes up a beauteous important proportionality of our subscriber base,” said Norström “As such, it is important for america to conscionable marque definite implicit clip that we amended the verification methods that we have. There are surely ways, implicit time, to find holes astir it. As that happens, we fig retired however to amended it implicit time,” helium added.

The enforcement said that the company’s effort to amended verify its users is not thing that would person an extremity day oregon would ever beryllium complete, but would beryllium considered an ongoing regular improvement.