Amazon just made it harder to share your Prime benefits

Amazon has put tighter restrictions on sharing Prime accounts, just days after adding streaming music to the list of subscriber benefits. The retailer previously allowed you to share your account with up to three others, but Amazon’s reduced that to only one other adult, as well as implementing new restrictions that make sharing with anyone but close family members impractical.

The reduced limit reportedly only applies to new Amazon Prime subscribers who joined after 31 July, although the new terms and conditions make no reference to the previous limit. Instead, you can only add one other adult to your Amazon Household, and you’re forced to share your payment details with that other person, allowing them to spend on your credit card.

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The move is clearly designed to keep Prime sharing confined to close family members, rather than different households sharing one Prime account to benefit from free next-day delivery, video-on-demand and all the other extras thrown in with Amazon’s £79 per year subscription.

Up to four children can still be added to members’ profiles, allowing parents to share their Kindle book purchases and other digital content with their offspring.

The tightening of Amazon’s conditions comes within a week of the company launching Prime Music, a limited catalogue of one million tracks that are available for free streaming to Prime members. It’s not clear whether the changes are linked, although rival streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify charge subscribers extra to share accounts with family members.