Spotify said Monday that it’s creating a legitimate way for people to share their accounts with their families. Anyone with a premium account can now add up to four family members, whose accounts cost half as much ($5) as a standalone login. The feature will be available to all Spotify users within a few weeks.
There have always been Spotify users who shared accounts by logging on to multiple devices and handing one to someone else, but the service isn’t designed to handle that. Two people can’t listen at once, so if your daughter tries to start playing music while you’re already listening, someone will be unhappy. Playlists and social connections also become de facto shared property. Spotify’s family subscriptions are an acknowledgement that additional family members are something less than completely new accounts, even if they should pay something more than zero.
This is the latest attempt by a tech company to address a persistent tension between those who sell digital media and those who consume it. When books, albums, and movies were physical artifacts, households had to own only a single copy of each one. It seemed natural to finish reading a book and give it to a family member as fodder for dinnertime conversation. But handing out copies of digital media was too easy from a technical perspective, so content companies tried to make it harder to persuade people to continue paying for things. They placed restrictions on how digital downloads can be used and have defined almost any form of sharing as piracy. Streaming services, in a way, are even worse. Not only can you not share that song with your wife; she can’t listen to any songs if you’re listening to your headphones on the way home from work. The assumption with digital media has been that everyone resides in her own silo, paying full price for every service she uses and product she downloads.
Spotify isn’t the first company to start chipping away at this philosophy. Spotify competitor Rdio already has a family plan that works similarly. Both Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) recently announced software updates that allow families to link up to five accounts, giving everyone unfettered access to anything any one of them has downloaded.
While these moves seem like common sense to users, there’s more going on under the surface. Downloaded content is subject to licenses that define how each book or song can be used. This explains why Kindle’s previous lending program was such a mess. It didn’t apply to all books, allowed each title to be lent only once, and limited loans to 14 days. But media companies are never going to lower these restrictions far enough to please everyone. By loosening them, the companies are reminding their users that they’ve never actually owned the songs they’ve been downloading.
For Apple and Amazon users, the shared accounts are essentially a bonus: They simply make it easier to do something many people feel they should be able to do. Spotify is asking for a bit more. The company is betting that people who currently pay nothing will see the additional convenience of family accounts as worth $5 a month. This could be a big source of revenue for Spotify, says music industry analyst Mark Mulligan, with one caveat. “Given that this is already a prevalent behavior,” he says, “how many people are going to have the intent and the willingness to spend an extra $5 a month?”
