Streaming music service Spotify is launching a new “Family” plan that will offer cheaper subscriptions to its paying users’ family members.
Subscribers will be able to add up to four family members to their account, with each paying half the price of a standard subscription: so £4.99 in the UK.
Each family member will have their own account on Spotify to create and follow playlists and musicians, as well as signing in to Facebook to follow friends.
Spotify’s chief content officer Ken Parks said that a family plan was “one of the most asked for features from our audience”, although the company is not the first streaming service to introduce it.
Rival Rdio launched similar family plans in August 2011 for up to three family members, before expanding the total to five in June 2013. It charges £17.99 a month in the UK for two unlimited subscriptions, then £5 each for a third, fourth or fifth family member.
In the US, Beats Music launched in January 2014 with a partnership with telco AT&T, charging a flat $14.99 a month for up to five people on 10 devices to use its service. The deal finished in October, however, and has now been removed from AT&T’s website.
These kinds of deals can be appealing for families, particularly parents who are concerned that their children might be downloading music illegally – although in truth, in 2014, they’re more likely to be streaming their music from YouTube.
For Spotify and its rivals, family plans are potentially a way to add more premium subscribers who, even after the 50% discount, boost these companies’ revenues much more than users of their free, advertising-supported versions do.
In May 2014, Spotify said that it had 40m active users including 10m paying subscribers. It has not updated those figures since, but according to music label sources, the company has since passed the 50m active users milestone.
Spotify declined to comment on the claim, but told the Guardian that the new family plan will launch in the UK in the next few weeks.
The UK is one of the company’s biggest markets: Spotify’s British subsidiary saw its revenues rise 41.8% to £131.4m in 2013, helping it post a net profit of £2.6m that year.
It has benefited from wider growth in streaming music in the UK, with industry body the BPI recently saying that the number of tracks streamed in the UK has nearly doubled year-on-year in 2014 so far, with Spotify and its rivals now streaming 300m songs a week.
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