- Spotify is now asking UK users to prove their age to access mature content
- The age verification checks have been introduced as part of the UK’s Online Safety Act
- Spotify says it will present age checks if it suspects you’re under 13, but many users have encountered checks despite being over 18
Spotify has become the latest app to introduce measures designed to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act, by asking users to undergo age verification checks if they want to view or listen to age-restricted content – and many users aren’t happy.
The age verification requirements of the Online Safety Act came into effect from July 25, and requires all platforms that display adult content to verify that users are over 18 using age verification checks.
So far, we’ve seen the likes of Xbox, Discord and Reddit introduce age verification, and now Spotify has done the same.
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Like Reddit and X, Spotify has partnered with digital identification firm Yoti, a service that conducts age checks via facial scanning. For Spotify users, Yoti will use different means of age verification, from facial scanning to requesting a scan of your ID if it suspects you’re under 13 (Spotify’s minimum age requirement).
It will also use algorithmic methods to estimate a user’s age. But Spotify is taking it a step further, stating in its official outline that “your account will be deactivated and eventually deleted” if you fail to complete the age verification process.
While Yoti claims that your data will be kept safe, and eventually deleted, the new requirement has caused uproar among some Spotify users.
Some have take to forums such as Reddit to point that young people are clever enough to find ways around the checks, for example using a VPN to change their location to somewhere other than the UK – and a minority have even threatened to revert to piracy (see below). What is ‘mature content’ in Spotify?
A phone on a green background showing a Peaches album on Spotify (Image credit: Spotify)
This is the burning question among Spotify fans, considering the music streaming app doesn’t host X-rated content on the same scale as Reddit or X. However, the platform does have certain features that are aimed at mature users.
In Spotify’s case, you may be asked to verify your age if you try to “access some Spotify content and features, like Music videos that are labeled as 18+ by rightsholders”. This could also apply to podcasts that discuss mature content and songs with explicit lyrics.
Fortunately, there is a way back if your account becomes deactivated due to an inaccurate age estimation. According to Spotify, you’ll get an email that “allows you to reactivate your account within 90 days of deactivation”, after which you’ll need to go through age verification checks again.
So far, I haven’t been asked to verify my age in the Spotify app when trying to access mature podcasts and music videos, but a handful of users on forums like Reddit who are well over the age of 18 have have already encountered the checks. Why have VPNs become so popular?
Spotify has explained in various community posts that it isn’t designed to work with VPNs, and you naturally shouldn’t use one to circumvent any age verification checks.
However, this hasn’t stopped free VPNs from dominating Apple’s UK App Store, as internet users look to find ways of protecting their data from future breaches, or perhaps even bypass those checks completely.
VPNs work by encrypting your internet traffic, but they’re not all equal – so it’s important to choose the right one for your needs. Free VPNs can log an excessive amount of data, which could ultimately put your privacy at risk, and sometimes lack important security features.
wtf is up with this coordinated push to tie your internet accounts to your government ID.
what garbage international NGO is behind it this time?
This isn’t an NGO, it’s multiple western governments. They want more control and the companies involved want more data.
The end of the anonymous internet was being predicted as the Corporate Web started taking off in the mid-00s. Rumors were swirling about companies like Meta requiring government I.D. at least five years ago.
This ID stuff is almost certainly going to happen this time.
Billionaires. Want to increase control.
And ‘adult’ content is code for queer. Anything else is collateral damage.
I don’t think it’s just queer content they’re targeting, though that is a big part of it. These people are also just puritanical fucks that think nobody should get to watch porn. Same people that support anti-sex worker laws, abstinence education, anti-abortion laws. It’s about control and stopping anybody from having any goddamn fun.
True. And we need to show them there are consequences.
They’re afraid we’re’attacking the family’? Okay, lets go. That shit’s evil anyway-children are not property of their parents, especially if those parents are 'stains, lets make this happen.
‘Christians are persecuted’? Well, let’s figure out what we can do to make that happen, what we can take from them, what we can exclude them from. Bet there are a lot fewer ‘chrietians’ on college campuses when it gets you blacklisted from any party worth a damn. Fewer christians in slums when the liqour store won’t sell to them fewer chriwtians in suburbs when it gets their houses vandalized.
Edit: pushing religion on children is child abuse. Letting children go to a church is child endangerment. Basically begging for the kid to be raped. Deliberate miseducation of your child or neglecting to educate your child is abuse. You do any of that, kid shpuld be taken and you should be sterilized, your property searched for other kids you might be keeping in your basement. Bet we’d find a lot of them.
They always wanted to do it and they are finally pushing it. Governments spend billions in planning their authoritarian shit, perhaps until now it wasn’t convenient for them because not enough people used the internet or they had enough control over it already.
international NGO
Bitch, it’s the same dudes as usual. Nothing “non-government” about this.
Name<=>IP Address<=>Time
Use “save the children” to record and squash political dissent
Next step will be to force VPN’s to identify
Then to make ISPs require logging and block non-identified traffic.
We’ll be running community wifi pirate networks and off-grid radio text forums in no time.
Age check for music. The authoritarians have won.
No. They can’t win.
Thats the thing. Evil is evil because it doesn’t fucking work.
They can only make us lose. That’s not them winning.
This is never going away no matter how much we hate it and it has very little to do with age verification.
Since when have there been age restrictions on music? Freedom of the arts, anyone?
If you’re in the US then it’s since Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore, got a bug up her ass. You can find video of Dee Snyder, lead vocalists of the 80’s hair metal band Twisted Sister giving testimony before congress.
Dee Snyder gave an eloquent defense of free speech in that testimony.
2Live Crew provided a significantly less eloquent and significantly more awesome performance on Phil Donahue.
You have (perhaps unintentionally) self marked your account as a bot account. Because some people enable the filter to not see these comments you may want to undo that.
Interesting. I didn’t know that was possible.
I thought that setting allowed me to see bot accounts. Thanks for the tip.Under settings there should be one box for “show bot accounts” which sounds like what you wanted on and another called “bot account” which lets people self identify an account as a bot.
Thanks. I figured it out after I looked at it more closely.
It was hilarious when Dee implied that maybe Tipper (Al Gores wife) was into BDSM because she was so up in arms about some lyrics. Al Gore looked like his head was gonna explode.
https://www.ranker.com/list/dee-snyder-speech-parents-music-resource-center/melissa-sartore
I remember. Bur AFAIK that didn’t have much effect except some funny stickers on US imports. I’d have noticed if anything like age verification for music had been in place in Europe (incl. UK) because I used to go to record stores and buy actual records. I still was a minor during the better part of the 1980s and very much into metal so I’d certainly know.
“PARENTAL ADVISORY”, once a coveted badge even 😄
Yeah, except Spotify isn’t just a music company. They’ve been trying for years to get you to use their App for other stuff that’s costs them less royalties.
So now Spotify includes all manners of audiobooks and shitty podcasts.
And while we all agree that age verification is bad… If anything ever deserves age verification, it may be Joe Rogan.
Tried Spotify years ago and found the sound quality abyssmal, the catalogue disappointing and the ads unbearable. Still can’t understand why people are wasting their time with that crap. OTOH people are using their smartphones and BT headphones as their primary source for music, so it doesn’t really matter what kind of noise they’re enjoying. Protip: Put your heads in the blender. Acoustuically equivalent, much cheaper and doesn’t make you half as stupid. Plus: wearing a blemder on your head might become the next big thing on TikTok.
If you buy your music, say on Bandcamp Friday where Bandcamp waves their revenue, you could host your own streaming server, and eventually cancel your Spotify membership.
https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
There is also Qobuz as an alternative which pays the artist $. 01873 per stream, as opposed to Spotify’s $0.003 per stream. About 5x more. Plus you can buy the music from the platform if you want. And it has higher quality audio, family plans, gift cards.
Qobuz+navi has been my go to for a while. Sadly, a fair amount of music I listen to isn’t on Qobuz (or Bandcamp).
Everything is on Qobuz for me. Bandcamp, not so much. But Bandcamp also has music you can’t find on streaming services.
Do it, why don’t they do it??? Because they are cowards!
Same goes for Nintendo fans and Nintendo 2, and many other who finally caved.
I’m sick of all these people saying but do nothingThey live from us, not the opposite. We have the power.
No no no, just start torrenting. Streaming services shouldn’t exist. They rob you & then geo-block you & then censor you
People only threaten to leave but never actually do it because “muh recommendation algorithm”
Replacing the huge library that I have on music streaming services with actual downloaded music I get to keep feels like it would be an absolute mammoth task. I really wouldn’t know where to begin.
I know how to pirate music, but it would take so long to comb through every album, artist, and playlist. Not to mention it would take up so much storage space on my phone.
If I could automate it somehow though, I’d find a way to make it work.
This isn’t my best work, and I need to make a readme, but I made this little tool for me to bulk download Spotify playlists: https://github.com/acarl123/YoutubeDL-GUI
You use exportify to get a csv from your Spotify playlist and then import it to bulk search and download using youtube-dl
Thanks very much, I’ll have a look!
You can only listen to a song at once, there’s no need for you to have terabytes of music in your phone.
I don’t want to have to go to my PC every time I want to listen to a specific song or album
If mobile phones weren’t built to be disposable you probably wouldn’t have to. Pinephone supports up to 2TB micro SD.
Can’t argue with that! Pinephone looks like a solid platform.
Well. then I guess you’ll die as a lazy, fat slug too lazy to get up from the couch and you’ll have to listen to whatever trash you’re getting served by those willing to spare you the trouble of walking three steps for an ever increasing fee. But stop blaming anyone else for your awful lifestyle.
I’m not paying for any streaming service, nor am I lazy or fat. How awful that I don’t want to have to constantly move files back and forth between my phone and PC, assuming I’m even at home where I can physically access my computer.
Maybe you’re fine with having 20 songs on a playlist to last you for a week, but some of us have very different listening habits. Try offering up something helpful like others have done and not being a total wankstain.
I’d rather drop dead than listen music on my phone. And no, I am not fine with “20 songs on a playlist”. And why should I feel the need to be helpful to an asshole like you?
Spotify fans are always going to turn to piracy unless whatever service tries to replace it has an equivalent library and price. They commodified music and there’s no going back.
hey, soulseek doesn’t gaf about your age
I swear if they continue with this kinda shit, I’m gonna go from ‘fan’ to ‘disappointed paying customer’
paying
It’s called ‘Premium.’ Costs am oh any why
I see shit going everywhere. Why didn’t that disappoint you with youself first?
Disappoint me with myself? What have I done?
Respected a corporation.
Respect = bad ???
$hut the fcuk 🆙, yer fcoking moron (am I doing this right?)
For corporations? Yup. You got it.
You were. Then it got pointless and personal. Like you seemed to have understood and immediately swept the rug right under yourself like a cartoon.
I’d ask if the head you cracked needed help but I think you may have made the point already.
Besides, I tried that a few years ago and I don’t understand any of the attention the experience has generated such an obsessive and chronic repetition of consumption among the masses. I like thinking. Same thought of anything opiate to boot. A real WTF?
💀
It’s all about context and delusion today. There’s even a good rep of it by a Cyn song, Hardheaded.
Funny enough, I think music is the streaming service that is safest from piracy.
A lot of us have considered migrating away from music services over the years and mostly always run into the problem of… this isn’t the 90s and 00s where we might listen to one band at all times. Instead it is more about liking a few songs from one band that The Algorithm then uses to figure out we like these songs from another and so forth. Its a mess for those of us who grew up on listening to all of Hybrid Theory on repeat for a month. Let alone the kids who grew up with nothing BUT algorithm based curation.
My understanding is there is stuff like lidarr and the like that try to capture that kazaa style experience but it is still inherently a pull experience in a world where the vast majority of people expect to have new songs pushed to them while they drive and so forth.
Movies and TV are one thing since even The Algorithm is mostly about telling us that we want to watch Palm Springs outside of The App.
And for everyone who is going to chime in saying “Well I don’t mind”: Fuck off. If you were the norm then Spotify et al would have never gotten popular in the first place.
Fuck off, nobody cares about you
Smile for the photo
I want to remind people something: you are using this decentralized and open source platform for free.
Spotify is shit but artists releasing their music there is not helping. There are plenty of musicians struggling to live off their career but these in top charts most people listen to are not poor, their are on spotify because it’s lucrative.
