Spotify has given parents a way to stop their children's listening from taking over their own account, with a setting that keeps kids and family music out of recommendations and out of Wrapped.
The company's framing is blunt about the problem it solves. "Parents love using Spotify to play music for their families. But parents don't always share the same taste as their young children," it said in announcing the change, which it has labelled as keeping your recommendations yours.
Switching the setting off changes nothing about what a household can play. Families can still search for, listen to and build playlists of kids music; those streams simply stop feeding the algorithm. Discover Weekly, Daily Mix and the year-end Wrapped summary are all affected.
The retroactive part is the detail that matters most in September. The setting applies backwards as well as forwards, so a year of nursery rhymes already logged will not turn up as anyone's top song or top artist when Wrapped arrives in December. Anyone who has watched their annual summary get hijacked by a cartoon soundtrack now has a few months to fix it.
Spotify has defined the category fairly widely. Kids and family music covers animated and live-action film soundtracks, theme songs from family TV shows, music from family entertainment brands and characters, family-friendly covers of popular songs, nursery rhymes and lullabies, sing-along and educational and activity music, and novelty and parody tracks aimed at families. That is a broad net, and where the line falls between a family film soundtrack and an ordinary one will decide how the setting behaves for a lot of accounts.
It rolled out globally earlier this month to both Free and Premium users, and the company describes it as the latest step in giving parents more control over how their households listen.
The change lands in a year when most of Spotify's product news has been about machines rather than families. The platform moved to flag AI artists and hold them back from recommendations this month, having announced the labelling system in August. What a recommendation engine should and should not count is turning into the company's defining question, and this is the domestic end of it.
The facts
- Spotify has added a setting separating children's listening from a parent's profile.
- It affects Discover Weekly, Daily Mix and Wrapped.
- The setting applies retroactively to music already played.
- It rolled out globally this month to Free and Premium users.
- Kids and family music covers soundtracks, nursery rhymes and parody tracks.
- Families can still search for and play that music with the setting off.
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