GoKawiilEdgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Spotify is broadly launching Managed Accounts for parents wanting a safe way for children to access music.
Managed Accounts have social features locked down and default to additional content restrictions.
At the end of the year, even Managed Accounts will receive their very own Spotify Wrapped.
Listening to music can be an intensely personal experience, but when we’re playing DJ to another listener — like kids in the family who don’t have a streaming account of their own — it’s all too easy to start messing up our own algorithm with their favorites. Thankfully, Spotify is not deaf to this concern, and this week the company is announcing a major overhaul to how its youngest listeners access the service, with the wide launch of Managed Accounts.
The idea is simple: Parents will be able to create Managed Accounts for kids who are under the 13-year-old cutoff for regular Spotify accounts. These will include some extra protections, like the profile being unsearchable, the use of avatars instead of profile pictures, and user-to-user features like messaging disabled. And, of course, explicit content will be blocked by default. Further, media will be limited to music, with podcasts and audiobooks inaccessible, and everything video initially disabled.
Spotify
Parents will be free to revisit that explicit content setting, as well as configure more fine-grained rules about specific artists or songs.
Spotify actually got this effort started a couple years back, testing it with paid Premium Family plans. But now Managed Accounts are rolling out for the rest of us, free to create in supported nations like the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and the Netherlands — with more coming soon.
Even with Managed Accounts locked down to avoid social features, Spotify knows that it can’t deny anyone the sheer joy of Wrapped, so these users will also get access to their own customized year-end summary. And like we said before — all this also means that your own account won’t be as skewed by all the kids songs you’re constantly being asked to play.
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