Just in time to rescue children from the throes of social distancing-induced boredom, Spotify has launched Spotify Kids. Parents living as hostages in homes that would normally be child-free for large chunks of the day can be heard rejoicing.
Spotify Kids went into beta last year. The trial version was limited to only select Spotify users subscribed to the Spotify Premium Family plan, At that time, the company cited concerns around curating content that most families would deem appropriate for children to engage with potentially unsupervised as the reason for such a restricted launch. It's an understandable concern, considering that the current form of Spotify "Adults" offers little in the way of moderation once a user signs in with Premium. Even with the explicit content filter on, without human curation, there's more than enough music on the service to scar young ears. Besides, who wants kids music junking up their weekly playlist?
As a service, Spotify Kids is a standalone app. It still requires an adult with a Premium Family membership to sign in, but once that's resolved, everything becomes kid-friendly. The app includes over 120 playlists and everything on it is curated by a human being. Spotify tapped resources like child-focused brands (think Disney, Nickelodeon), educational institutions, and even museums to create something both fun and useful.
How Spotify Kids Differs from Spotify
While default Spotify has always included more than just music, Spotify Kids contains a much larger percentage of non-music tracks to peruse. There's carefully-vetted popular music, but even within that, there's a focus on movie soundtracks and songs from children's television shows. The Kids app is also comprised of lots of educational content designed around teaching children things one might expect to be covered in schools, such as counting and the alphabet. Perhaps there's a good opportunity with this app to supplement home lessons while schools are closed. Spotify also promises diversity throughout the app, adding content representative of various religions, music from different countries and eras, and multiple languages. There's even a lullabies and bedtime stories section.
At $14.99 in the US, Spotify Premium Family is the most expensive way to use the service, and it's required to use Spotify Kids as there's no free version. However, the other Premium benefits translate to the Kids app, too. That means they'll have ad-free listening, and a separate collection of playlists from the (up to) six adult accounts registered to the Family plan. Given the company's preternatural ability to match playlists to people's moods and tastes better than most humans can, there's good reason to believe the lengthy beta period and years of research Spotify has poured into this app will lead to a product that, at the least, won't ruin the next generation.
Spotify Kids is available on the App Store and Google Play in North America, as well as the UK, France, Sweden, and many other countries.
Source: Spotify