Spotify’s Family Plan QR Code Could Cost You Premium Access

Sharing accounts with family and friends is one way to bring down the cost of subscriptions. I’ve done it. You may have as well. Streaming companies are all too aware this is going on, and they’ve made moves over the last few years to prevent folks from sharing their accounts too easily. Those include introducing family plans (even Strava has one now) and extra fees for folks who don’t live with the primary account holder. Now, Spotify is trying to tighten the screw on people who share a Premium Family plan and don’t reside at the same address. It recently deployed a verification system that uses QR codes.

Spotify said on a support page that it might ask Premium Family members to verify they live with the plan’s manager by scanning such a code. After Spotify makes that request via a notification, the user has seven days to complete their scan. Otherwise, they may be locked out and they can’t join another Family or Duo plan for a year. Alternatively, they can sign up for their own Premium plan. An individual subscription costs $13 per month, compared with $22 for a family plan, which covers up to six accounts. 

The company has tried to prevent people from using screenshots as a workaround for QR code scans if family plan members aren’t living close to each other. Reddit users claimed that Spotify refreshes the codes every few seconds, but suggested they were able to use video calls on additional devices to scan them remotely.

While some users are unsurprisingly not too happy about the QR code policy, it’s really just Spotify enforcing existing rules, as Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström said on an earnings call on Thursday.

“This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. Family Plan has existed for a long while. It has been around for, I think it is now close to 12, 13 years in Spotify history, and it makes up a pretty significant proportion of our subscriber base,” Norström said, as to 9to5Google noted. “As such, it is important for us to just make sure over time that we improve the verification methods that we have. There are certainly ways, over time, to find holes around it. As that happens, we figure out how to improve it over time. This is not something that has an end date. This is not an implementation that is going to complete. This is just ongoing routine.”