Skip to main content

With growing competition, Spotify’s family plan crackdown could backfire

Most popular music streaming services offer family plans, letting you and a few family members split the bill and get your music streaming on for even less than a standard subscription. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that considering it’s so easy to do so, some users also share their subscriptions with friends to lower the cost even further. Companies frown on this, but until now, none have done much to combat it.

Now Spotify is taking steps to put a stop to this, according to Quartz, but it could end up costing the service subscribers it badly needs if it’s going to continue to compete with Apple Music, its main rival.

Recommended Videos

Spotify Premium for Family subscribers in the United States and Germany have begun receiving emails asking them to confirm their location by clicking a link that then requests their GPS information. “To continue using Spotify Premium for Family, you’ll need to confirm your home address,” the emails read. An ominous warning follows: “If you don’t confirm, you may lose access to the plan.”

On the Spotify website, the company states that users of the Premium for Family plan, which supports up to five people, must all live in the same location. Users who have received these emails are saying that the name of the plan is misleading if this is the case, since not all families live together. Families with separated parents, for example, could be affected by this, regardless of everyone on the plan being family.

“Spotify is currently testing improvements to the user experience of Premium for Family with small user groups in select markets,” a Spotify spokesperson said in response to Quartz’s request for comment. “We are always testing new products and experiences at Spotify, but have no further news to share regarding this particular feature test at this time.”

Apple Music is already leading Spotify in the U.S., so the last thing the service needs right now is to appear hostile to users, but this is exactly what is happening. That’s not the only competition either: With SiriusXM poised to acquire Pandora, thereby creating the world’s largest audio entertainment company, the service may see another serious competitor.

Billboard reports that almost half of global streaming subscribers, including those of Spotify’s rivals, use family plans, so this is a large population of users it could end up angering. If Spotify starts pushing users away and into the arms of its competition, the outlook for the service could suddenly become a lot gloomier.

Kris Wouk
Former Contributor
Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…
Amazon Music Unlimited raises prices on individual and family plans
An iPhone 14 displaying the Amazon Music app with a Dolby Atmos Music playlist, next to a set of Apple AirPods Max headphones.

Amazon Music is the latest streaming company to announce a price increase.  In an email sent to subscribers, Amazon indicated that the price for an individual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription will be going up by one dollar, on the first billing date on or after March 5, 2025.

This means that Prime members will now pay $11 per month (or $110 annually) instead of $10, while non-Prime members will pay $12 instead of $11. The price of family memberships is also set to rise by $3 per month at the same time, bringing the new subscription fee to $20 per month (or $199 annually).

Read more
Spotify Wrapped 2024: how to find your stats and the new Creator Wrapped
Three phone screenshots of Spotify Wrapped 2024 on a yellow background.

There's something immensely satisfying about looking at a year's worth of listening condensed down to a neatly packaged presentation. We're now able to get this from a few different streaming services -- yesterday saw the release of both Apple Music Replay 2024 and the first time Amazon has gotten into the game with Amazon Music Delivered 2024. Spotify, though, has been doing it for almost a decade, and today we get this year's iteration of Spotify Wrapped 2024. A similar program started in 2015 under the name "Year in Music," was rebranded as Wrapped in 2016, and has been going strong and growing ever since. For 2024, Spotify is adding a new way to feed you all your streaming info -- an AI podcast.

You can still get your streaming info as you have in the past, as a series of Instagram-style story cards scrolling to your favorite tunes of the year, you can also get that information presented to you by two AI-generated podcasters. The new feature, called Your Wrapped AI Podcast, is powered by Google's NotebookLM.

Read more
Nvidia’s next-gen GPU plans could be good news for Intel and AMD
Two RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards sitting next to each other.

According to a new leak from Benchlife, Nvidia may launch the vast majority of the RTX 50-series in the first quarter of 2025 -- but one GPU is notably missing from the early lineup. That could be very good news for AMD and Intel. While Nvidia will rule the high-end market, the other two brands may get to swoop in with some of the best graphics cards for gamers on a budget and get some breathing room before Nvidia strikes back.

Benchlife reveals that we'll see many of the RTX 50-series staples arrive in the first quarter of the year. The flagship RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 arriving in January feel like a sure thing at this point, but many leakers also suggest that we'll see other GPUs make their debut during CES 2025.

Read more