Spotify is expanding its tools to give children under 13 more room to develop their own music tastes outside of its dedicated Spotify Kids service. The new feature, called “managed accounts for young listeners,” is rolling out to seven new markets, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, and is exclusively available to owners of a Spotify Premium Family Plan.
Controls and Customization
The company’s existing Spotify Kids app offers content—including music, audiobooks, and stories—that is fully curated by editors and is very limited compared to the full Spotify catalog. The new managed accounts offer a flexible middle ground. They are restricted to music only, ensuring the child cannot access adult audiobooks or podcasts. Parents retain significant control and can use features to control the explicit content filter, restrict specific artists or songs they deem inappropriate, and toggle to hide all videos and looping visuals.
For the young listener, the new accounts provide a personalized experience. They can make their own playlists and access personalized features like Discover Weekly to find new recommendations, allowing them to expand their interests without parental interference. As Spotify notes, this feature is about giving “parents and kids the ability to explore music together… helping guide their individual discovery.” Crucially, a child’s listening history on these managed accounts will not affect the music recommendations or the annual Spotify Wrapped results of the parent’s account.
How to Set Up the Account
The feature will be accessible through an update to the Spotify app. Owners of a Spotify Family Plan can navigate to Settings and privacy > Account > Premium Family. From there, they select Plan members and then the option Add a listener aged under 13 to begin the setup. The parent or legal guardian must confirm their identity, set up a PIN to control the experience, and enter the child’s basic details.
Author’s Opinion
Microsoft’s move to make cloud saving the default in Word, while framed as a beneficial feature against data loss, is fundamentally a crucial strategic step to enforce user lock-in and solidify OneDrive as the mandatory foundation for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By making document saving seamless, the company simultaneously ensures that user data is available for future monetization through AI services like CoPilot, effectively making the convenience of auto-save inseparable from the necessity of cloud storage. This change is a clear indicator that the value of productivity software now lies not in the application itself, but in the proprietary data it channels into the cloud.
Featured image credit: emojisprout via Unsplash
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.