Disappointing User Experience Switching to Family

[GamilyFuy]

My Question or Issue

I'm disappointed with the user experience of switching from Premium to Family.

My young family has grown to a point where separate accounts makes sense. Each family member has made their own playlists over time. So when I upgraded I expected an easy way of distributing playlists from the Premium account.

I thought that the connected accounts might be available automatically as sharing options in the desktop client. But no, they don't appear there.

Then I wondered if there was a library function back in the browser-based account somewhere, which would allow me to move or duplicate playlists intuitively. I couldn't find one.

Maybe there was an option to duplicate or merge all the playlists with the other accounts connected under the family plan? If so, I haven't discovered it yet.

I searched for an answer here and ended up emailing the playlist links. This felt really clunky. It's all fine now, but I'm baffled as to why it couldn't be any easier.

On top of also needing to search to find the answer to why my monthly payment date had changed (this could have been clearly explained), overall the experience of upgrading to Premium for Family has been less slick than I would have expected from one of the world's pre-eminent tech companies. As Premium for Family has been around for a while now, I similarly expected a more mature product.

I realise these are my expectations at fault, so my message would be that this particular part of the User Experience lags behind that of the apps.

Or am I missing anything here?

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Plan

Premium Family

Country

UK

Device

Numerous

Operating System

Android, PC, MacOS

[Petya]

Hey there @GamilyFuy,

Thanks for reaching out in the Community! Sorry to hear you've had a hard time sharing the playlists with your members.

Note that Spotify is made for single use only, meaning one person is supposed to have one account. In your case, what you could have done, is made the playlists public, so that your members could follow them. Or even better - collaborative, so they can still add or remove songs from there.

As for the payment date, when you have a Premium subscription, you're charged on the same date each month. When you subscribe to Premium Family your subscription date changes because of the price difference between Premium and Premium Family. As soon as you update your payment details, you get Premium Family while you have paid for Premium. When the Premium time you have paid for runs out (sooner because of Premium Family), your payment date is changed as well. 

We hope this sheds light on the subject! Let us know if there's anything else we can help with.

[GamilyFuy]

Thanks for the response Petya!

Regarding Spotify being single use - surely "parent makes playlist for child" is a common use case. I wonder if there's enough diversity advocating for parents and young children in Spotify?

(On that topic, I notice that while I can exclude explicit content, there's no way to automatically, or even easily on mobile, select clean edits when they're available. This seems an obviously desirable feature for a family-oriented product, and reinforces my perception - correct or not - that there may be opportunity for Spotify to connect better with certain types of user).

I did find the answers to both my original issues on the community - so that's a positive - but I feel I shouldn't have had to.

My main point is that the User Experience could be a lot slicker, and the status quo should be improved rather than being justified or rationalised.

[Jacob]

@GamilyFuy, thanks for coming to the Spotify Community!

Spotify is actually working on a new standalone app just for kids: Spotify Kids! If you follow that link you'll be taken to an official Spotify post about the upcoming app. It's looking at addressing some of these issues you've mentioned.

Happy listening!

[GamilyFuy]

That looks great, for young children, and I'll certainly check it out if/when it launches in my territory.

What's the best way to propagate the feedback regarding the disappointing user experience? One reason I posted here is that the Ideas section wasn't working.

[Jacob]

@GamilyFuy,

Here's a direct link to submitting an idea to Spotify: https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/postpage/board-id/ideas_submissions/search-before-post-mode/...

If you have issues after following that link, let me know!

[GamilyFuy]

Thanks Jacob and Petya - I really appreciate your input.

[Brownas]

Hi,

I'm also feeling that the family upgrade isn't as straight forward and explained in enough detail requiring me to search for help and now having to sign up to the community for assistance.

I've had Spotify for a while now but the majority of the library is my daughters and due to the occasional owners rights becoming a problem of who can listen I've recently upgraded to the family package. My question is although we all have separate logins now I can still see all my daughters playlists and wondered if I can remove or hide them so I can only see my own ? It also appears that when the family members receive the family invite they all start from scratch so my daughter wont have all her playlists with her login (this hasn't been confirmed as yet), am I correct and do I need to send her links for each playlist ?

Thanks

[GamilyFuy]

Hi,

Yes, it seems you will need to use email or a social network. As suggested above, that's because we've been using Spotify wrongly all this time.

I find it astonishing that this use case hasn't been considered or supported. I can't help but think it's indicative that nobody is thinking about families properly.

My recommendation would be an online playlist librarian function, and a "move/copy/share playlist to family user" menu command.