Spotify is cracking down on Family plan sharing, but you can still bypass the checks

Spotify is stepping up enforcement of its household location rules, leaving several Premium Family plan subscribers suddenly booted off their shared plans. The streaming giant is cracking down on family plan sharing to ensure that all members reside at the same location as the plan manager.

A growing number of Reddit users are reporting that Spotify Family plan account holders are receiving sudden address re-verification prompts, particularly if they are not at the same location as other users on the Family plan. This re-verification is seemingly being done in person, with constantly refreshing QR code scans between the plan manager’s device and the member’s phone to confirm they live in the same household.

The QR code seems to refresh every few seconds, making sharing screenshots futile. However, users are sidestepping the verification by resorting to screen sharing instead and using multiple devices to successfully scan the QR code on one of them.

According to Spotify’s support documentation, plan members have seven days to complete the QR code scan after getting the re-verification notification. If a member misses the window or cannot complete verification, they are automatically booted to the ad-supported Free tier. They are also banned from joining a different Family or Duo plan for 12 months, though they can subscribe to other individual plans.

This isn’t Spotify’s first attempt to crack down on subscription sharing. The platform infamously trialed GPS checks back in 2018 and formally updated its global terms in 2019 to mandate periodic location validation. However, user pushback over privacy concerns ultimately softened Spotify’s crackdown.

Other competitors in the music and video streaming space also routinely enforce household-based checks, often requiring periodic Wi-Fi check-ins to ensure that all members of their respective Family plans are part of the same household. If you’re sharing a family plan with strangers or among friends that don’t live together, you can expect the crackdown to only intensify in the coming days, across Spotify as well as other services, as the platforms try to push plan sharers onto their own individual plans to improve their ARPU.