Spotify has said that the stricter checks now appearing on its Family Plan are not a crackdown, but they are also not going away. The comments came during the company's third-quarter earnings call, following reports earlier this week of a new verification method.
Like nearly every family-sharing subscription, Spotify's Family Plan requires members to live in the same physical household. The streaming service has historically been looser about both the requirement and its enforcement. That appears to be changing: a verification QR code has recently started showing up for some users. The code makes it somewhat harder for remote members to complete verification, and users who do not finish the process can reportedly be barred from Family plans for a full year.
During the earnings call, an analyst asked about Spotify "beginning to crack down on Family Plan subscribers that do not live in the same home." Co-CEO Alex Norström rejected that framing. He described the change as a "routine improvement of our verification methods" and said the work will continue.
"This is not something that has an end date," Norström said. He added that the effort is not an implementation that will reach completion, but "just ongoing routine."
Norström pointed to the plan's long history and its importance to the business. The Family Plan has existed for close to 12 or 13 years, he said, and accounts for a significant share of Spotify's subscriber base. Given that, he argued, it is important for the company to keep refining its verification tools over time.
He also acknowledged that people can find ways around such systems. "There are certainly ways, over time, to find holes around it," he said. When that happens, Spotify works out how to improve the process.
Taken together, the remarks suggest Spotify does not plan to retreat from verifying that Family Plan members share a household. The QR code approach is, in Norström's description, only the latest step in an ongoing series of adjustments rather than a one-time campaign.
Spotify has been busy on other fronts as well. Recent coverage has noted podcast memberships that let listeners support shows and receive perks, the rollout of "User Notes" and "Running Mode" features on Android, and the addition of an AI chatbot to the app.
