Spotify Family Account Nightmare

A long time ago I set up our Spotify family account. I don’t remember, if it was difficult or what I really had to do, but I thought it was an easy to be done job. I though …

Today a friend was calling me and asked, if I could help him set up the account for his family. 4 people in the house and he thought, it makes sense to finally get an account where they would be able to download and listen to songs offline. Fair enough. I thought, I could help, as I did not remember any difficulties setting up mine. But I was proven wrong.

I was not able to simply set up the users by adding them to my main (admin?) account. I had to send them all an email invite! And then it was not too easy as they all already had free accounts. I might have been too stupid, but I haven’t found anything within their accounts, where I could enter the invite code for example. The invitation link also did not work easily and especially not on their phones.

But before I go into details, I was wondering about one two things:

  1. Why would someone make it so super complicated (and in the end not possible without connecting your account to Facebook or deleting your account to create a new one) to change your user’s name? This is nuts. Really! When they created their accounts, they did not give themselves good names and were given a cryptic one by Spotify. Now there is not bloody chance to change this!?
  2. The concept of the family account is, that all of the 6 possible people using the family account have to live under one address aka one house or apartment. Why the hell do I have to invite everybody via email then? Why can’t I simply add 5 more people to my family account with their names and – sure – their email address, but would have to get an invite code via email etc. This is totally stupid and makes no sense, when they have to be in the same household anyways?!

I really like using Spotify for many reasons, but these two things drove me crazy tonight.