If Wall Street’s pressure on accounting policy sounds familiar, it should. Streaming services have often turned a blind eye to account sharing during their periods of growth, only to become lenient again once viewers get hooked. Netflix tweeted in March 2017 that “Love is sharing a password” before launching its own compliance policies in May 2023. Later that year, Netflix raised prices by up to 17 percent, and in April 2024, the company saw the policy pay off with 9.3 million additional subscriptions and a 54 percent increase in operating income. Netflix is not alone in this practice, as competitors like Max (now HBO again) and Disney+/Hulu eventually followed suit with their own policy enforcement.
The Goldman report argues that while family plans are great for attracting subscribers to the platform, “the per-user monetization of these plans lags far behind the pricing of individual plans. In our view, these plans offer a greater value proposition to consumers than the standard individual tier, which we believe gives DSPs the opportunity to capture more value through larger price increases or by adjusting family plan definition/eligibility, without significantly impacting demand.” In short, analysts are confident that music streaming services like Spotify can impose strict account policies, raise prices and still make more money.
So if you’re uploading your favorite playlist to a shared account, you may soon get a warning that it’s time to check with your plan administrator. If that’s physically impossible to do in seven days, you may need to find an alternative streaming service or start digging through drawers until you find that old iPod.
