On a recent family road-trip, while skipping the *many* tracks currently in Spotify’s Top 50 chart that have explicit lyrics, we wondered again why the streaming service hasn’t ever offered a ‘radio edits’ mode for child-friendly listening.
If streaming services have ambitions to replace broadcast radio, especially in the car, it seems like an obvious (and, indeed, necessary) move.
Anyway, we digress. In the absence of a Spotify Kids’ Mode, there’s a startup touting itself as ‘Spotify for Kids’. It’s called Fruit Punch Music, has been released as an iOS app, and will cost parents $3.99 a month, or $24.99 a year.
The service is advertising-free, and offers stations themed around genres like pop and country, as well as other themes from Disney and Nickelodeon, aimed at 3-8 year-olds.
Its press release references “tens of thousands of songs”, so this is a carefully-limited collection for now, and on-demand listening isn’t possible. Parents can also set daily time limits on how long their children can use the app, as well as blocking certain genres (something we’d like to think of as a ’NO MORE FROZEN!’ mode).
Like other niche streaming services, the risk here is of being squeezed out if the big guns do a better job with this niche – Deezer and Napster have launched kid modes in the past already.
More immediately, there doesn’t appear to be an offline cacheing/listening mode, which (for travel, holidays etc) would be desirable for this audience.
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