Spotify Safety Guide for Parents
What parents need to know about Spotify — including explicit music and podcast content, social listening features, and the lack of built-in parental controls.
Spotify is a music and podcast streaming service offering on-demand access to millions of songs, playlists and shows across devices.
Official age
13+
We recommend
13+
Developer
Spotify
Risks
2
Overview
Spotify is the world's largest music streaming service, with over 600 million users. It offers music, podcasts, and audiobooks. While primarily a listening platform, Spotify includes social features that allow users to see what friends are listening to and create collaborative playlists. The platform hosts a vast amount of explicit music content and podcasts on mature themes with little restriction by default. Notably, Spotify does not offer a dedicated parental control mode or family dashboard, making it harder to manage what children can access.
How children use it
Children use Spotify to listen to music, discover new artists, and follow playlists curated by influencers or friends. Podcasts on topics including true crime, relationships, and mental health are increasingly popular with teenagers. The social listening feature means children's listening habits can be visible to their followers, which raises modest privacy concerns.
Main risks
Recommended privacy settings
Private Listening
Location: Profile → Settings → Social → Private Session
Set to: On when desired
Enabling a Private Session prevents your child's listening activity from being shared with their followers via Spotify's social features. Sessions expire after 6 hours.
Explicit Content Filter
Location: Profile → Settings → Explicit Content → Allow Explicit Content
Set to: Off
Turning this off prevents explicit tracks from playing. Note that this filter applies to tracks labelled explicit by rights holders — some tracks with adult content may not be labelled and will still play.
Social Features
Location: Profile → Settings → Social
Set to: Review and restrict as appropriate
Spotify's social settings control whether your child's listening activity, playlists, and followed artists are visible to others. Turning off public activity reduces privacy exposure.
Parent actions
Turn off explicit content in Spotify settings on your child's account or device and explain that the filter, while imperfect, removes the majority of labelled adult tracks
Time: 5 minutes
Review podcast content your child is following — search Spotify for their followed shows and listen to a few episodes to assess suitability
Time: 20 minutes
Consider using Spotify's family plan and encourage your child to use a private session if they do not want their listening visible to followers
Time: 10 minutes
Related app guides
If you need to report this
In immediate danger: call 999. For non-emergency police matters, call 101.
Concerned about a child but it's not an emergency? NSPCC helpline 0808 800 5000. Childline for young people 0800 1111.
Myths & facts
Myth: Spotify is just music, so there's nothing really to worry about.
Fact: Alongside music, Spotify hosts a huge, largely unmoderated podcast library covering true crime, relationships and mental health, some of it with graphic or adult themes — it's worth checking what shows your child follows, not just what songs they play.
Myth: Turning on the explicit content filter blocks anything inappropriate.
Fact: The filter only blocks tracks and podcast episodes that have been labelled 'explicit' by the artist or rights holder — content that hasn't been tagged, including some mature podcast episodes, can still play even with the filter switched on.
Myth: There's no younger-child version of Spotify — it's all one app for everyone.
Fact: Spotify Kids is a separate app, available through a Premium Family plan, built for roughly ages 3 to 12. It uses a curated, ad-free library with no explicit content and none of the main app's social or sharing features.
Age by age
- 5-7
Use the separate Spotify Kids app (via a Premium Family plan) rather than a regular account — it's built for this age with a curated library, no ads, no explicit content and no social features to manage.
- 8-10
If they've moved on to the main Spotify app, make sure the explicit content filter is switched on and can't be changed on their profile, and check in occasionally on what podcasts they've started following.
- 11-13
Keep the explicit filter on and ask what podcasts are in their feed — true crime, relationships and mental-health shows are popular at this age and vary widely in how graphic they get. A private listening session is worth showing them if they'd rather their followers not see everything they play.
- 14-16
Conversations matter more than settings now: talk about the difference between enjoying a song and absorbing what its lyrics normalise around violence, substance use or relationships, and check they know podcasts aren't reviewed by Spotify the way music labels are.
Frequently Asked Questions
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