You now have to give Spotify your home address to use its Family Plan or face losing access
Spotify will use Google Maps address search to help users find and set their address, or ask them to enable location services
Spotify is clamping down on people abusing its shared Family Plans.
For £14.99/mth, the Spotify Family Plan lets up to six people share a single Premium subscription, rather than paying £9.99 each.
However, it appears people were abusing the system, by sharing their Family plan details with people outside of their family who live at different addresses. As a result, Spotify is now clamping down on its eligibility.
As part of a change to its Family Plan terms and conditions on 19 August, Spotify said: “In order to be eligible for the Premium Family Subscription, the primary account holder and the subsidiary account holders must be family members residing at the same address. Upon activation of a subsidiary Premium Family account, you will be asked to verify your home address. We may from time to time ask for re-verification of your home address in order to confirm that you are still meeting the eligibility criteria.”
The terms continue to state that Spotify will use Google Maps address search to help users find and set their address, or ask them to enable location services. Spotify warned users it “reserves the right to terminate or suspend access to the Spotify Premium Family service and the Spotify Premium Family account(s) immediately and at any time if you fail to meet the eligibility criteria.”
This has raised privacy concerns, especially among those who don’t want to share their location. To reassure users, Spotify has said all the data is encrypted and “can be edited by the plan owner as needed,” adding that the location data collected is only used by Spotify for that purpose. However, if users fail to verify their address, their access will be cut off or suspended until they do.
Spotify trialled a similar feature earlier this year, asking for exact coordinates, but this has been softened as part of the official roll-out.
What this change doesn’t take into account is family members who may not officially live at the same address, such as children who split their time between parents, or family members studying at university, for instance.
Spotify recently made more positive changes to the Family Plan when it added parental controls via an Explicit Content Filter which lets the master account control the settings on all connected accounts.
It also introduced Family Mix, a personalised playlist made up of songs based on the entire family’s listening habits. Whereas the Family Hub lets users manage their Family’s settings in one place, including adding or removing family members, keeping their home address up to date, and adjusting parental controls.