Being a parent isn’t easy. There’s everything you need to do and should do to support your kids, and there’s an impact that your kids are making to your life. Some of it more obvious from the digital interpretation that occurs after things have happened.
Like with music. Streaming music, specifically.
While it’s true that your kids are probably developing a similar taste in tunes to you and helping keep the 80s alive, the extra stuff that isn’t what you love listening to is probably affecting your playlists, whether you like it or not.
You might secretly get into a bit of “Golden” and “Takedown”, but be less enthused by hearing the samn damn Disney track fifteen times this morning alone. We get it. And apparently so does Spotify. Finally, anyway.
Years after children started affecting music streaming playlists because of the shared nature of letting them listen to stuff on your phone, Spotify is adding a feature to prevent their tastes from getting in the way. Somewhat, anyway.
Spotify is now rolling out a toggle in settings that lets you intentionally exclude music from your profile of the kids and family kind. That’s potentially bad news if you don’t mind sharing your fondness for the Huntrix and the K-Pop Demon Hunters, but more positive if you don’t want every single song from Frozen to make an appearance before you get to a track you actually like.
It includes kids songs from TV shows, kids songs from movies, nursery rhymes, and pretty much anything else that would specifically be asked to be played by your kids, or possible from them if they have your phone and it’s unlocked (or know your PIN).
They (and you) will still be able to find the songs on search — this isn’t about hiding the songs — but rather simply about removing the songs from your recommendation lists, and even from daily and weekly mixes, plus the year end of Spotify Wrapped.
Simply put, if your end-of-year Wrapped list looked like it walked out of the kids profile on every streaming service, this year it might actually more reflect you. And it might be time to consider a kids profile and account, or alternatively a family account on any streaming service to keep it like that.
