Sexually explicit audio on Spotify India is easy for children to find—even via innocent searches like “bedtime stories” or “ASMR.” Investigations and user reports show adult tracks surfacing alongside legitimate results, often without explicittags or age warnings.
A Reddit user discovered his 14-year-old brother saving explicit clips in playlists titled “Good pods,” “Follow for more,” and “Requests.” Reporting each item required repeated email verifications and bot checks, a process former Spotify employees have also criticized as slow and ineffective. Similar threads describe users stumbling on explicit results while searching for ordinary songs.
In India—Spotify’s second-largest market—the safeguards are thin. There’s no Spotify Kids app, limited age checks, and no law requiring platforms to filter explicit audio. While Spotify offers parental controls (explicit-content filters, artist blocking, “not interested”), they depend on accurate tagging—and much of the material isn’t labeled, leaving families unaware of what children can access.
The scale is significant: Spotify has 40 million+ active users in India. Search terms like “storytelling,” “bedtime sounds,” or even “clapping” can surface adult content, sometimes buried, while suggestive queries return thousands of explicit tracks across languages—available to anyone with an email address.
Experts warn the risks are compounded by cheap data, rising smartphone use, and weak parental controls. Child psychologist Indu Punj notes that children often explore such material out of curiosity, without context to process what they encounter—creating ripple effects at home and school.
Unlike markets such as the UK, where platforms face tighter age-verification requi
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