Dear Spotify, let kids hear music!

4 points by FrankyHollywood 1 year ago | 10 comments

My kid was singing a song this week "What feels more awesome than taking a shit? It’s dropping a turd from your anus". It's a Dutch song by comedian Brigitte Kaandorp [0]. Kids love it, because it is about poop.

It's fun of course, but once this has been listened you enter a personal Spotify bubble of recommendations. A song by “Boer Harm" was recommended next. My 8 year old kid was listening to "I can fuck very well, I will lick your anus and beyond. I like it dirty and filthy" [1].

Spotify is not a record label and selection criteria seem to be sparse. There is a whole sewer of songs only about farting, shitting, penises and what not. The sole purpose seems to be to make some money out of kids searching dirty stuff.

When I was young I loved to discover new music. From my parents record collection I started listening to Queen, Vangelis and sometimes Bach. I loved it! Being a kid today makes it a lot more difficult to discover great music. All the music in the world is available to you, but once you have listened to a poop and fart song it’s over, you are in the dirty rabbit hole.

Yes a kids may laugh at an occasional naughty song, but the next recommendation should be music. I’m pretty sure Spotify can estimate a listeners age with a more 95% accuracy. Kids will be kids, but surprise and inspire them, kids are not stupid. Let kids hear music!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT9QRmgwVYs

[1] https://genius.com/Boer-harm-brommers-kieken-lyrics

mpalmer 1 year ago |

If passing along particular cultural artifacts to your children is important to you, don't delegate the responsibility to an algorithm managed by a for-profit business.

Also:

> Is Spotify appropriate for my child?

> We have designed Spotify to be appropriate for listeners 13+ years of age, although the minimum age for using the service varies according to local law.

> What if my child is too young for Spotify?

> We encourage you to check out Spotify Kids, our separate, ad-free service designed specifically for children 12 and younger.

https://www.spotify.com/safetyandprivacy/files/Parental_Guid...

FrankyHollywood 1 year ago | |

>We have designed Spotify to be appropriate for listeners 13+ years of age

I did not know that, so officially my kid should not have it's own account.

Still that doesn't make it better in practice. Spotify is able to predict average age from listening behaviour. I was recommend the 'Dad's music' playlist last week :)

They know your age, and they could use that for something positive.

mpalmer 1 year ago | | |

Positive according to whose standards? According to which set of values?

And what incentive do they have to do this?

talldayo 1 year ago |

Spotify lets you disable Explicit-tagged songs, if that's what you want: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/explicit-content/

Besides that though, I don't really know what we should expect. Kids are going to Google stupid stuff as long as they have access to the internet, and as long as the internet isn't moderated they will usually find that stupid stuff. Services like Spotify and YouTube don't really have some social obligation to redirect them to a Rolling Stones song instead of the next Skibidi toilet video.

FrankyHollywood 1 year ago | |

> they will usually find that stupid stuff

I know and I don't mind, kids can have a laugh. I am just annoyed with the fact that most recommendations after are also terrible. There are plenty of popular songs they will also like. The medium is the message.

Spotify decides what is in these recommendation lists. Not actively prompting junk would have my preference. Just like you don't want school cafeterias only serving fries and donuts.

talldayo 1 year ago | | |

This is how every single music recommendation system works, though. If you listen to metal, you get metal recommendations. If you listen to immature poop songs, you get those back too.

There isn't a switch you can flick that adds taste to your kid's listening habits. There isn't a single paid music service that offers that, outside the parental controls switch to disable explicit music. Spotify won't change this because their highly-relevent feedback loop is why people (myself included) still pay for their service in the first place.

I wish you luck, but being angry at Spotify for not changing your kid's listening habits is a bit solipsistic.

null_investor 1 year ago |

Your request is missing the product research and feasibility part, which is that there's likely 0.1% or less kids that navigate and select songs on Spotify.

This means this likely has no business case, and you can imagine how laborious tagging and labelling music is.

As somebody else pointed out, one could avoid explicit songs, but that might not work as expected, as that song you mentioned yourself could be labeled as explicit.

Whenever something doesn't work the way you expect, maybe it's worth applying common sense knowledge to figure out whether it doesn't work the way you expect because the money incentive isn't there or just because it would be tough to build it.