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Spotify terminated a test requiring its family plan subscribers to verify their location or risk losing access to its streaming music service. According to recent reports, the company has sent emails to its "Premium for Family" customers who have asked them to confirm their location via GPS. The idea here is that some customers may have shared family plans, even if they are not linked, to pay less for Spotify by sharing support for the plan for multiple users. And Spotify wanted to destroy them.
Spiegel Online and Quartz first reported this news on Thursday.
Of course, as pointed out in these reports, asking users to confirm a GPS position is a poor means of verification. Families often have members who live or work outside – they may live abroad, have divorced or separated parents, have children in the university, travel for work or to go to work. any other reason.
But technically, this type of situation is prohibited by the terms of Spotify's family plan – the rules require that all members share a physical address. This rule had not been applied in the strictest way before, while many did not realize that they had broken it by adding members who did not live at home.
Customers were also bothered by the way Spotify wanted to check their location – instead of entering a mailing address for the main account, for example, they were asked for their exact location (GPS).
The emails also threatened that they could not verify the account in this way, which could cause them to lose access to the service.
Family plans are often abused by those who use them as a loophole to pay the high price. For example, a few years ago Amazon decided to no longer share the profits of core members because they found that they were largely shared outside of immediate families. In this case, it limited sharing to two adults who could both authorize and use the payment cards in their files and allowed them to create other, more limited profiles for the children.
Spotify could have done something similar. He could have asked Family Plan's adult subscribers to re-enter their credit card information to confirm their account, or selected placements for children with different privileges to make sharing less attractive.
Perhaps he will come back to the operation of the audit now, given the reaction of the client.
We understand that the verification emails were only a small-scale test of a new system, and not something that Spotify is deploying to all users. The emails were sent to just four of Spotify's markets, including the United States.
And the test only lasted a short time before Spotify turned it off.
Reached for comments, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed this by saying:
"Spotify is currently testing Premium for Family's user experience enhancements with small user groups in select markets. We're still testing new products and experiences at Spotify, but we have no other news to share about this particular feature test. "
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