When Spotify arrived in the United States in 2011, most people had never heard of music streaming. By the end of 2012, over one million Americans were paying a monthly subscription.
The following year, streaming’s impact was so big that Billboard adjusted their rating system to include streaming data on top charts, later declaring 2013 the year that streaming officially became unignorable.
Flash forward a decade and streaming is an assumed aspect of the music-listening experience for kids today, which they typically do for 2.5 hours a day.
In many ways, this is an awesome thing. Easy, affordable access to music allows more kids to tap into the positive impact of music — something that research has made clear. For example:
- Music can relieve tension and boredom.
- Music helps adolescents deal with loneliness and controls mood, and can help kids in their process of identity formation.
- Music provides kids a way to achieve group identity.
But the power of music brings potential for negative effects as well. For example, studies also show a correlation between listening to explicit content, like lyrics glorifying violence or sexual promiscuity, and similar behaviors in adolescents.
In the past decade of streaming’s dominance, there has been a lack of safe music streaming options built just for kids. Parents were in a tricky position — how do we give kids access to all the positives music can offer without exposing them to all the negatives it can also provide.
It’s no surprise that a safe music streaming app became the most frequent request we received at Gabb. In response, we launched Gabb Music in June 2022 and Gabb Music+ in 2024.
Kid-Friendly Music Apps
If you’ve searched Google Play or the Apple app store, you may have come across apps like Baby Mozart or Sesame Street Makes Music.
These apps are geared toward teaching kids about music, how to make music, or are games that use classic tunes like nursery rhymes. These aren’t helpful if you want an app that lets your kids play music they want to listen to.
Prior to Gabb Music, the best options for kid-safe music streaming were “kid versions” of apps that were obviously made for adults.
What this typically resulted in was one of two things:
- basic parental controls that can be toggled on within the adult app, but that do a poor job of properly protecting your kids, or
- a watered-down listening experience for your kids that offers them kid-sung covers of hit songs and nursery rhymes that kids — especially teens — are not interested in.
With Gabb Music, we took the kids-first philosophy we used to create Gabb phones and applied it to music streaming to offer kids the freedom and control to safely listen to music their way.
Gabb Music is The Largest Kid-Friendly Music Library in the World
Gabb Music is a safe music streaming service built from the ground up for kids and teens. It offers listeners the largest kid-safe library of music, including new releases and top hits from all genres and decades.
Using a first-of-its-kind process, Gabb Music scans millions of the most popular songs in the world using the best tools available and some of Gabb’s very own technology so nothing inappropriate gets through.
As a final step, Gabb’s Curation Team reviews the songs and builds mixes and playlists to help kids discover and appreciate the best music out there without parents worrying about what might pop up next.
We filter lyrics, titles, artist names, and images to ensure there’s no explicit language or inappropriate subject matter. We don’t just bleep out explicit lyrics, we remove them entirely.
Parents don’t have to stress about inappropriate content slipping through the limited controls that were added to adult streaming apps as an afterthought.
It’s music streaming with the peace of mind parents are looking for and the library of music kids are looking for.
Gabb Music vs Gabb Music+
Families can choose from two different subscription options: Gabb Music or Gabb Music+.
Gabb Music provides a radio-style listening experience. Kids simply pick a station (mix) and let it play. They can skip up to 6 songs in an hour and have the ability to like and dislike songs, tailoring their music to their preferences.
Our curation team is constantly updating and adding new mixes so your kids can discover new music and enjoy old classics. Mixes include genres, activities, moods, decades, and more. Kids can find mixes either on the Homepage or the Discover tab. Their listening history will be saved under the My Music tab.
Gabb Music+ is everything great about Gabb Music with added customizations, so kids and teens can make the music theirs. With Gabb Music+, users can search specific artists or songs, enjoy unlimited skips, create playlists, and even download music to listen to on the go.
Currently only available on Gabb phones, Gabb Music and Gabb Music+ are exactly what happen when kids are the top priority in tech innovation.
Has your family used Gabb Music yet? Tell us what you think in the comments!
Author Jake Cutler
Jake is Gabb Now's managing editor. He and his wife have three wild little boys. Prior to Gabb, Jake was a band manager and adjunct faculty in the English department at BYU and BYU-Hawaii. His own writing has been published by Esquire, Forbes, Elsewhere, Iron Horse Literary Review, and others.
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