Wish your kids played more than Baby Shark do-do-do-do-do? If you have a Spotify Premium account, you can get them using an app to expand their musical tastes.
One of the more exciting things about being a parent in this day and age is knowing that a world of music will be waiting for your children when they start using a phone, a tablet, a computer, or even maybe a media player.
Going back even a decade ago and surely the century, you’d have to buy or borrow your music, building up your library gradually. Bit by bit, you’d expand your collection and your musical knowledge, but you’d have to spend a small fortune to get there.
These days, it’s totally different: a monthly subscription with any number of services gets you access to millions upon millions of tracks. For typically under $15 per month, that collection just materialises, just like that. Crazy.
Parents tend to share their collection with their kids, though, which means a perfectly good collection of music that resembles what you like most often has styles reserved for kids poking on through. You might have some hard rock, jazz, metal, hip-hop, pop, or classical, and then all of a sudden, out pop The Wiggles, Emma, Peppa, Elsa, or Baby Shark (do-do-do-do-do).
Fortunately there may be a bit of a solution on the way, provided your kids have their own media player, phone, or tablet.
Spotify is this week releasing Spotify for Kids to Australian Spotify Premium Family subscribers, providing an app for kids to engage with that offers ad-free music listening, provided the parents have a Premium account.
Launched back in October last year, this one requires a paid family account, so sadly, there are no freebies here, and the free version of Spotify won’t work. If you have Spotify Premium for Families, however, you can play, and when you do, there’s a more colourful and playful version of the Spotify app waiting built with kids in mind.
The app provides access to playlists for kids, with companies offering musical lists for children to get in on, including Disney, Discovery Kids, Universal Pictures, and Nickelodeon, to name a few.
There are cards inside the app to let kids browse genres and moods, as well as hits, movies, TV shows, stories, titles to learn with, and even titles made for bedtime.
Parents can pick between two categories at signup, with “Audio for Younger Kids” limiting the Spotify for Kids service to tracks for younger audiences, including sing-a-longs and lullabies, while “Audio for Older Kids” opens up tracks and playlists, all the while applying a bit of a filter to keep things age appropriate.
Interestingly, Spotify has made some neat changes to make the app just that much easier for kids to get their mitts on it, supporting an offline mode for taking the music to go, and allowing the app to run in landscape mode on Android tablets.
There’s no voice support yet, however, with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant not yet supported by Spotify for Kids.
Parents keen to try it out will need a phone or tablet for their kids, and the Spotify Premium account for Families for $17.99 per month. Family accounts support up to six accounts under the one banner, and each Spotify for Kids install will count as one of those, though at least the account will fall under what your kids like, which at the least means no more awkward conversations with your co-workers on why Baby Shark occupies such a high spot on your mixes.
