The Parent's Guide to the Spotify app
Parents can consider managed profiles for their children on Spotify, but more monitoring options may be required.
If you're a parent who wants to manage and monitor your child’s activity on the Spotify app, you can use a combination of approaches. Spotify’s own parental control features allow parents to restrict certain features in-app; however, parents should consider additional techniques to fully monitor their child’s activity on Spotify.
While it might not seem important, the Spotify app is evolving into its own form of social media. For example, users can create profiles, send invites to each other for listening parties, and even send each other private messages. That's on top of the explicit songs and podcasts, or racy album art that parents would like to ensure their child isn't exposed to.
Monitor your child’s activity on Spotify
Spotify has recently introduced changes that allow users to add each other as friends and send messages to each other. Even with parental controls enabled on Spotify, parents can’t manage this kind of activity if their child already has a Spotify account.
However, some parental control apps, like LivingRoom for Families , monitor the entire screen and can capture all activity on your child’s iPhone.
This is a much more comprehensive approach for monitoring all kinds of apps, because you, as the parent, see what your child sees on their iPhone.
Additionally, parents can create a managed account for their child instead of allowing them to have access to their own account.
A managed account allows parents to severely limit social features of Spotify, and this includes limiting whether their child’s Spotify profile can be found by other profiles. Parents cannot see private message contents with a managed account only.
Enable parental control and managed accounts on Spotify
If parents have the Family Plan on Spotify, they can create a new profile for each child and limit some content for their children and Teens:
- Restrict your child’s ability to play songs Spotify has marked as “explicit”
- Block specific songs or artists
- Disable videos and the “Canvas” feature
From the Spotify app or website, select your profile and open your Spotify account settings.
There are a few settings that we recommend parents enable:
Use the Spotify Kids app
Another option parents can consider is to use the Spotify Kids app on their child’s device instead. Spotify Kids automatically blocks certain features and presents children with a curated selection of audiobooks and songs.
Note that you will need to have a Family Plan and a profile set up for your child.