Spotify ramps up policy enforcement on family plans
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/spotify-ramps-up-policy-enforcement-on-family-plans/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/spotify-ramps-up-policy-enforcement-on-family-plans/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
61 replies
If they want it to be a household plan, they should call it that instead of falsely advertising it as a family plan.
Exactly. Families are extremely varied in logistics and presentation… Businesses in their ivory towers imagine a stereotypical nuclear family where everybody lives in the same house. Out of 5 families I personally know; only one fits that description.
I need to get a RED account, ugh, the entrance test seems annoying but I want to selfhost my own music.
Soulseek is pretty decent for music
"analysts are confident that music streaming services such as Spotify can enforce strict account policies, raise prices, and still make more money."
They looked at Netflix and Disney and they are right. This is a no brainer if you're a business. There's literally no downside other than angry comments online.
This is desperation just like the disney ad thing.
If you're going to pay for music, buy it DRM free on bandcamp etc, or CDs and rip them, you can make multiple copies and anyone in your family can play them at any time. Shitify is a joke.
This won't really make them more money. Considering there's better services like YouTube Music.
Take picture of QR on primary phone. Send photo with QR to people on the family plan
@404found
This is not a measure against your extended family or close group of friends. This is to prevent selling to or sharing with strangers.
@return2ozma
They are not that dumb. Apparently the code changes every few minutes (or seconds). Just a matter of time until they also check geolocation and/or IP during the scan.
Actually they probably already have geolocation enabled because the article says the family member needs to be at the same location when they scan the code.
I guess family plans are for members who live at the same house. If someone moves away to college then they can't be a part of the family anymore.
I mean a simple video call where you share your screen, and some network thing/config might solve that? If they’re not given exact/precise location on eg your phone, will they default to country/city? There must be some workarounds to these silly things.
You can spoof a lot with enough motivation. But it’s likely inconvenient enough that it will “catch” 90% of the targets.
I'm not on Spotify, but I'd like to use Qobuz. Sadly it's not available where I live. The idea is great though, listen whatever I want with an option to purchase drm free albums I like the most.
spotify single-handedly increasing music piracy rates back to napster levels
There is a certain poetry to them recreating the problem they solved.
i just hope this means people will start buying music again. 1-10 dollars for an album containing 5-20 DRM free music files is probably better value in the long run than spotify's subscription ever was. and with navidrome, mpd, and its clients, managing them was never easier; plus artists get way more of that profit. everyone wins.
Meanwhile in a meeting room in Stockholm:
If they do this to me, I have zero reason to stay with them. My ex pays for it. If they kick me off because my physical address is no longer the same, I won't use them. I'm sure he will stop paying for the daily plan and go back to free or, use a different app altogether. Good luck spotify. Did you learn nothing from Netflix?
Netflix actually ended up with an increase in subscribers from their crackdown. Maybe Spotify did learn from Netflix.
Their stock is down 40% YoY and they are cutting thousands of staff including their director of content. Looks like it bought them 24 months of bluster and then their watchtimes plumetted.
capitalism machine prioritizing short term over everything else, working as intended.
Wow I missed that part, thank you.
No, they didn't. Please, let's not interrupt.. I want them to torch their subscriber numbers
Or Joe Rogan?
Using a different music service is so easy. You can't even use the excuse that your friends are all on there. Stop giving them your money.
Don’t forget the warmongering Spotify do. Their profits pays to create tech that’s aimed at killing you.
This is why I deleted my account. Fuck spotify and its bloodthirsty ceo
I cut them out and canceled my subscription when they gave rogan that contract, fuck spotify
whats a good way to find new music based on a curated library/playlist/settings? i’m on apple for now but yeah.. this has always been rough finding new tunes or artists.
There's Tidal, which is what I'm planning on moving to once Spotify kicks me off
I haven't used it in a while since I don't have an active account there, but I really liked the randomizer in Deezer. It always showed me interesting songs that I hadn't heard before.
Deezer is also pretty lenient with its family plan so far. However so is YouTube. YouTube family, which includes YouTube music, isn’t even excessively expensive if you actually share it between 6 people.
Well that's pretty crummy. That's a very long ban, and a lot of extra money.
I have to give location permission to a music app?!
I wonder if you can you log in on a new phone once you got the notification
On android Bluetooth is tied to the location permission, because scanning for Bluetooth devices can be used to narrow down the device location.
It doesn't really say that, I don't think? It only says you need to be "in the same place", because you need to scan a QR code, right?
Nothing really preventing you both from just sending the QR code via message either... 🤷♂️
Navidrome.
“We'll heave and haul and roar o'er the dark blue wave!”
I'm still learning how to set it up to meet the easy of YouTube music. But storing more content is getting troublesome with price of drives. What do you use for mobile access? I use Symfonium
They did something like that once a few years ago. I didn‘t see their email and my account was swiftly permanently blocked from the program. No chance to appeal. I was pretty upset for a moment, then made a new account and connected it to the family account. If they kick me out again I‘m gone for good.
I‘m not paying the kind of money they‘re asking for to listen to some music and podcasts that run ads and sponsor segments. Discoverability became insanely bad years ago. Most of their recommendations are obvious product placements that they‘re not declaring properly.
So yeah, looks like Spotify is about to extract some more money from customers with dubious methods short term and losing a lot of us long term. But I am prepared.
Why not just use Qobuz instead?
It's a temporary solution. they're bound to enshittify if they ever come close to spotify's popularity. or they'll just get bought out before getting there
Even if a temporary solution, it's better than sticking with spotify in the mean time.
Qobuz also advertise their family and duo plans as being among friends that aren't living in the same house. So it's not just something they don't police, they actively allow it.
any media that requires a permission from an external party to play can and will eventually be taken from you. at least qobuz seems to be drm-free (i don't use the service, so don't quote me on that) so you should be able to make a copy of what you listen to. at least before they enshittify.
still, i'd personally not feel comfortable entrusting a streaming service with being the gatekeeper of the media i want long-term access to.
And people have scoffed at me for buying individual songs on iTunes instead of just jumping in bed with Spotify....
No matter how bad my financial situation becomes, as long as I can still charge my iPhone I will have access to not only my full music library, ad free, I also have access to the 50+ audio books I have bought on Apple Books completely ad free.
I just need a way to download the audio books without DRM and save them on my home server to feel fully at ease.
You know what would be better? Have the audio files, in
flac, or at least high-resmp3to listen whenever you want, from any device you want, without the need of an Apple account.Which is why I have downloaded my music from iTunes as normal non-DRM files.
Ive spent all day working on a way to move my family off Spotify.
Ive settled on navidrome behind wireguard and a signal chat where they can request music. The requests are filtered through AI to format it before they are fed into sksld to be downloaded and moved into the respective family members navidrome library.
Will it work, I'm not sure but ive spent so much effort and I'm gonna be sad if they dont even try it out.
Christ, that UX sounds horrifying, honestly. I'm sure they appreciate your effort, but realistically I wouldn't expect anyone to use it over any streaming solution
They are mostly set in their ways music wise so once I have 95% of their music which ive already done via Spotify cloning. It shouldnt be to many individual requests. I dont know I think saying !music chapel roan expectations and then having it show up a few mins later isnt to bad of a UX.
But yeah I don't know how else to make it better. It can never be "search and find any song" like Spotify. I did look into writing a plugin to hook it to soulseek but it didnt seem like it would be doable at my.level.
I use the slsk interface. It’s fine popping a few songs at once.
I generally hate Ai but I used it to tidy the old lists I had and present in the organisation level I wanted (albums etc) I then found a script, that when ran finds and DLs those playlists. It gets it about 95% right.
For navidrome it’s not great with the info pulled from music beats etc. I was trying to do it manual then I found a tool that lets me match an album to the music. It’s created for missing data/covers.
I have this. It’s an adjustment but it’s pretty decent for an almost free cost. It takes some tinkering but it play music fine. That’s good enough for me.
The free tier 3 ads per song will get them.
Test out which navidrome client each person would prefer yourself. I made the mistake of first advising Amperify to someone who likes to listen on shuffle instead of by album.
Is navidrome hardened enough to expose to the internet? i think my sister would like to use the sharing function which is currently locked since its only available inside our lan
Probably I mean it’s built to not edit your mp3s (for better or worse), it’s written in GoLang yay but who knows in this age.
Currently I’m only hosting it on LAN and relying on song caching of outside but I wouldn’t be too worried about opening it up.
My navidrome subscription just blocked my daughter...
No, wait, that was me, nevermind.
Wait, why did you block your daughter on your free Navidrome?
Oh shit, I'm in trouble
All the songs I listen to on Spotify I downloaded to have offline. There are a few apps out there that actually rip from Spotify instead of finding the song on Youtube or other services, and I actually have all in Opus 320kbps quality. Ofc I share a family subscription with my friends. If they were to give me just a week, I would simply start downloading anything I have not downloaded yet. For anything else I could rip from youtube, and once a year, buy a month of subscription just to rip all songs in higher quality and cancel again.
Soulseek, people. Just pirate things and send money directly to artists (or buy merch). Fuck all these streaming companies