Spotify says yes, it is busting people for using Family Plan sharing too widely

Spotify’s co-CEO said it will keep tweaking verification as people ‘find holes around’ methods like its new QR codes over time.

Stevie Bonifield

Oct 22, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Stevie Bonifield

is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI.

Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week’s earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don’t actually live together with anew QR code verificationmethod that requires scanning the plan manager’s phone.TechCrunchreports that in response to a question about the “crackdown,” he called it a “routine improvement” instead:

This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. 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.

This isn’t the first time Spotify has tried to limitsharing Family plans, which it says are only for people living in the same household. The new QR code verification method has forcedsome usersto get creative to stay on their shared Premium subscriptions — the coderefreshes every few secondsand anyone who misses the seven-day window to scan it gets banned from joining a different Family or Duo plan for 12 months.

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