Spotify Kids is a stand-alone music streaming app for Android and iOS devices, designed specifically for children.

The app lets children listen to their favourite music and audio with their own account, without hearing explicit content, and listen to playlists made just for young listeners.

It is available exclusively for Spotify Premium Family subscribers. A Kids profile counts as one account in a Premium Family plan. You can create up to five Kids accounts for your Family plan and download the app to as many devices as you want.

You can get a month’s free trial for Premium Family. After that, it’s £16.99 a month.

Audio for older kids is ‘chart pop, TV and film hits, bedtime stories, background music for gaming and homework’. Audio for younger kids features ‘nursery rhymes, bedtime stories, children’s songs, lullabies and much more’.`

It’s designed specifically with kids in mind. This means that they can browse the music library without the possibility of them coming across explicit content.

The specially curated playlists revolve around fun and educational activities and topics, such as ‘songs about space’, ‘outdoor fun’ and ‘homework beats’.

The visuals are colourful and fun and it’s very easy for children to navigate. Once you sign up, they can choose from an array of 12 animated avatars.

Inappropriate content

Spotify Kids playlists are created by a group of editors and are deemed to be child-friendly.

However, there is a ‘Grown-ups’ section, which allows you to change the age bracket, view listening history, block specific songs and delete your child’s account.

If a song is selected as ‘hidden’, that song won’t be visible anywhere in the child’s app. Note that blocking a song only removes it from that specific child’s account and you’ll need to go through the process again if you have more than one child, each have their own account. 

While parental controls of the kind found in Spotify Kids can be a useful tool, they don’t eliminate risk completely. Ensuring your child can recognise and respond to challenges is the best way of helping them gain digital resilience.

Privacy settings

Spotify has also created a separate privacy policy for Spotify Kids.

It won’t collect location data (region restrictions are based on whatever location the parent’s account is set to). The name and age you enter for each Spotify Kids account is fully encrypted.

Spotify only saves data related to what songs a kid is playing and liking, and it says that data will neither be sold nor shared with third parties for advertising purposes.

The older age bracket

Children towards the upper end of Spotify Kids’ 0-12 age bracket may feel restricted by the music choices on offer – particularly if they’ve previously been using the main app.

Although most popular artists are included, you won’t find full catalogues for any. Even the likes of The Beatles don’t have all of their songs in the Kids app.

It’s worth remembering that there is an option to restrict explicit content within the main app.

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This article was last updated on 07/07/22.

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