“My wife and I have a mix of Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers in our house. The obvious choice for a music-streaming service seemed to be Spotify since it works on both platforms. Or at least it seemed that way until we ran into the baffling and user-hostile way Spotify handles home postal addresses,” Josh Centers writes for TidBITS. “(I should have guessed something like this would happen after Adam Engst ran into an incomprehensible track limit on his account—see “The 10,000 Track Limit: Why I Switched from Spotify to Apple Music,” 30 August 2017.)”

“You don’t have to give Spotify a home address unless you sign up for a family plan,” Centers writes. “Apparently, Spotify requires address verification to try to ensure that all family members are in the same household, so presumably, those addresses need to be entered identically… [But] there’s no way to see the address you entered. In fact, until recently, the only way to change the address associated with your account was to delete your account and create a new one. Now you merely have to cancel your subscription, wait for your account to revert to the free tier, and then re-subscribe.”

“I strongly suspect this is a scheme to make the music industry happy, but it’s user-hostile and does nothing to prevent users from sharing family plans across households,” Centers writes. “Apple must have better leverage with the record labels because location isn’t an issue for Apple Music. Plus, Apple Music now works with Alexa.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Not to mention that it really makes no sense to subscribe to Spotify when it has 40% fewer tracks than Apple Music for the exact same price. Apple Music boasts a catalog of 50 million songs; Spotify has just 30 million. If you’re still subscribing to Spotify, it’s past time for you to cancel it and upgrade to Apple Music. (See also: How to move your Spotify playlists to Apple Music.)

SEE ALSO:
Apple is the real winner in Spotify’s battle against paying songwriters more – April 9, 2019
Apple Music overtakes Spotify in paid U.S. subscribers – April 5, 2019
Apple will not appeal songwriter royalty increase, digital music competitors Spotify, Google, Pandora, and Amazon – March 7, 2019