Going to offer a hot take here: I hate Spotify. Okay, maybe it isn’t so much of a hot take. There are reasons I don’t use it as much as I used to. The free plan is worse than ad-supported YouTube. That is saying something. However, it seems their paid subscription isn’t much better. Family paid plans are getting harder to share with actual family members.

Last week, Spotify announced plans to “crackdown” on people sharing family plans with people outside of the home. The company is rolling out a method of having family members use a QR code to log in.

Meaning that the account holder must show a QR code for the other member to log into their plan. Obviously, their goal is to crackdown on people sharing their service with friends. Basically, people living outside of the home. This is going over like a lead balloon.

Spotify Family Plans Just Got Harder

“…this is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan,” Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström said. “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. 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.”

What this doesn’t take into account is family members away at school. Spotify, of course, offers student plans. Nevertheless, what is the point of getting a family plan when you can’t even share it with your family?

YouTube Premium requires you to check in from your home group once every 30 days. Spotify has become the worse app for music. Just another reason we need iPods back.