The internet has changed the way that we interact with music beyond all recognition in the past twenty years, but you can probably break those twenty years down into two eras. There was the Napster era, and then the Spotify era. The Napster era has been and gone. The Spotify era is right here and right now – and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. It is, however, slowly becoming more corporate and a little less rock and roll.
We should all be upfront and honest with ourselves about what caused the popularity of Napster. As much as we can pretend that it was about finding new music or trying things before we bought them, what made Napster popular is that it gave millions of people the option to steal music and get away with it anonymously. Many of us did indeed discover dozens – maybe even hundreds – of new musicians through Napster, but those musicians didn’t financially benefit from our enjoyment of their work. Napster did phenomenal damage to the music and recording industry, and in many ways, the industry never recovered in terms of physical sales. It didn’t help that copycat services like Morpheus, LimeWire, and SoulSeek sprung up alongside it. All have since been shut down, but the harm they did lingers on,
When Napster was eventually shut down, and it became clear that the law would no longer tolerate copyright-breaching peer-to-peer music file sharing, the ‘good times’ appeared to be over for streaming. We had the option to buy music online in a digital format, but very few industry figures seriously believed that would work. If people were going to be forced to pay a few dollars to buy a track, it was thought that they’d prefer to go back to the old way of buying a CD from a store instead of paying for something that they couldn’t pick up and touch. In a way, they were right. People have never been all that interested in buying digital music to own online. They are, however, interested in subscribing to a streaming service for a small fee. Nobody paid much attention to Spotify when it first arrived – but now it’s become the app the whole music industry revolves around.
We’re seeing the ‘Spotify’ model replicated in various other forms of entertainment now, from movie streaming services to online slots websites. You could even argue that online slots came first. The joy and appeal of online slots websites are that you don’t need to walk into a casino or own multiple cabinets at home to play multiple different great online slots – you just log into the website, and all the games you could ever want are already there waiting for you. The same can be said of Netflix and movies, and of course, Spotify and music. With great power comes great responsibility, though, and now Spotify is (somewhat reluctantly) being forced to act as a censor and keep the delicate ears of children away from content that might be deemed as ‘damaging.’
Spotify has resisted any attempt to censor the content it hosts for a long time, other than including an ‘explicit’ tag next to songs that contain either profane language or adult subject matter. The case they’ve argued is that this amounts to the same system that once applied to CDs and physical copies of music in stores. Many songs and albums came with an ‘R’ rating or a ‘parental advice’ sticker on them, but most stores didn’t refuse a minor permission to buy those songs if there wasn’t an adult with them. The stickers were advisory, and Spotify’s on-screen labels were advisory. They’ve finally bowed to pressure from parents, though, and ‘Spotify Kids’ is now available throughout the United States of America and much of Europe.
The ‘Spotify Kids’ feature allows parents to do far more than just ensure that their children aren’t listening to anything that might have suggestive or offensive content. They can view every single song that their child has played in the past three months, and also selectively block the playback of any song on Spotify regardless of whether or not it’s considered to be ‘explicit.’ To some parents, this tool will provide a welcome relief. Young children have a habit of playing the same song over and over repeatedly if they’ve fallen in love with it. Spotify Kids gives those parents the option to block that song for a while and force the child to take a ‘time out.’
The chief problem that parents might face is persuading their child – especially a teenaged child – to sign up for the ‘Kids’ service in the first place. The aesthetic of the service is cartoonish and clearly aimed at young children, and the songs it offers are only a tiny fraction of the full Spotify range. There are hundreds of millions of songs on Spotify. As of the time we’re writing this article, there are only eight thousand songs on Spotify Kids.’ It’s clear that extreme censorship has been performed upon the service – far beyond just removing songs made by contentious artists – and the lack of options is likely to make the service unattractive to some. It will be especially unattractive to any child who’s used to having access to the full Spotify service and is then asked to deal with this drastically restricted version instead.
We can’t help but think that this is a curious way for Spotify to go about the task of making their service more child friendly. It should be possible for them to allow the setup of multiple user profiles under one account and allow the ‘master’ user to set limitations and restrictions for all sub-accounts. This is the way things work with Netflix, and even with Microsoft Windows. It would presumably have required less programming on Spotify’s behalf to provide this option than to create a whole new version of the platform, too – but perhaps there’s a method to their madness. The service is new and might be expanded in the weeks and months to come. We’re just going to have to wait and see.
If you’re a parent and you like your child having (safe) music available to them as a form of entertainment, Spotify Kids is now there for you to consider. If, however, you’re a teenager and you regularly use Spotify however and whenever you please, perhaps it would be better not to tell your parents that Spotify Kids exists!