Spotify
Spotify just announced it's testing a new parental control feature that will allow parents to block explicit lyrics and other content. As a parent, I say it took them long enough!
Currently, Spotify has a stand-alone app, Spotify Kids. But the Kids app is really aimed at toddlers and preschoolers — the "Baby Shark" set. It has a really limited selection of songs (for example, a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, but almost nothing from her latest album).
This leaves a gap for older elementary school-age children who are starting to form their own musical tastes, but for whom the full library of modern music is not exactly appropriate.
The initial pilot program will be for people who create a new kid account to be managed as part of a Family Account. For now, it is available only in 3 countries (Denmark, Sweden, and New Zealand) but hopefully will roll out to more countries soon.
On all accounts, it's possible, deep within user settings, to turn off explicit lyrics, which makes songs marked "E" unplayable. However, this isn't a solution designed like a parental control: The user can easily turn this setting off. If you click on a song with explicit lyrics, you'll get a pop-up saying that it can't be played. It will direct you to the exact toggle switch in Settings to turn explicit content back on.
The new parental controls will allow a parent to set this up in a way that kids can't just turn it back off. They'll also offer the ability to block specific artists or songs.
The new feature allows parents to block or limit the videos on Spotify (including the short looping videos that play over a song). As Spotify is pushing deeper and deeper into video podcasts as a business strategy, this matters a lot.
I have a second grader who really enjoyed being able to listen to music on Spotify — he set up a playlist with favorite songs he had heard on the radio and started to add other songs he discovered through Spotify.
But eventually, I noticed that he was coming across other kinds of stuff. There were meme-y songs with Gen Alpha slang like "Sigma playlist." There was also a lot of video podcast content that basically looked like some YouTube content, like videos of people playing Minecraft or other video games.
As a parent, I'm not overly concerned with some bad words in popular songs. But Spotify isn't just for music anymore, and the amount of video content and other stuff made me realize that Spotify wasn't an app that — for now — I felt comfortable letting my kid use on his own. I deleted it from his iPad. Which stinks!
I hope this rolls out very soon in the US because no one will be more excited to be able to get back on Spotify than a certain member of my household.
