In short: Spotify needs your data (birthday and gender) to serve you the best content possible. It’s also part of an effort to keep the platform safe for children and teenagers.
Are you wondering why a music streaming service like Spotify would need to know your birthday and gender? It turns out, providing your information is very important. Let’s talk about it.
Why does Spotify ask for a date of birth?
Most streaming services, like Spotify, ask for your date of birth (birthday) upon registering. From a legal standpoint, it acts to ensure you’re of the proper age to register on the platform.
According to Spotify’s terms of use, you need to be 13 years of age (or the equivalent minimum age in your home country) or older in order to use Spotify and access all of its content.
Spotify wants to keep the minimum age at 13 because opening the service to younger children would subject it to tighter restrictions on showing ads and collecting personal information.
Additionally, it’s so they can have an idea of the age range of their users.
Instead of guessing the age range of their users, they have the information readily available. This can help Spotify provide the best song recommendations based on age.
Does Spotify do anything with your birthday?
Spotify needs to know its users’ birth dates to serve the best content based on age while making the platform as safe as possible for kids and teenagers.
1. Serve you content based on your age
Spotify uses your date of birth to serve up content based on your age. Not only do Spotify recommend songs based on your date of birth, but they also curate special playlists too.
For example, the Spotify Time Capsule is a personalized playlist that plays two hours of hits from your teenage years. It is a personalized playlist that will bring back good memories.
The songs you get will be different from others based on age.
Someone born in 1980 might get songs from Janet Jackson and Nirvana, while someone born in 1995 might get songs from Coldplay and Jason Mraz.
It’s a great way to reminisce about the good times you had as a teenager, whether it’s your first kiss or partying with your adolescent friends, all made possible by providing your date of birth.
2. Make the platform a safe space for underage users
Spotify has a vast collection of explicit content. In order to serve the right content to the right audience, they need to have the correct information about their users’ age.
The minimum age for using the service varies according to local law. For example, the minimum age to listen to explicit content is 19 according to the local legal requirements in South Korea.
In the United States, however, anyone above the age of 13 can listen to Spotify, as long as the person has a guardian (18 years or older) to agree to the terms of use.
But why serve explicit content in the first place? Spotify includes explicit content because they want to respect every artist and serve their content how the artist intends it to be heard.
This is the reason why Spotify encourages everyone to provide their accurate age to ensure every user is protected by the age-based safeguards within their service.
At the end of the day, Spotify is striving to make the platform a safe space for everyone. The company asks for birthday information to prevent underage users from explicit content.
Can you be too old for Spotify?
You can never be too old for Spotify. Anyone can use the music streaming service as long as the person is over 13 years old, although the minimum age varies according to local law.
Why does Spotify ask for gender?
Spotify needs to know whether you are a male or female to serve the best content based on gender while serving targeted ads that are gender-relevant.
1. Serve you content based on your gender
Spotify asks for your gender to tailor your listening experience and serve you the best songs, although the app doesn’t need to know this information to do its job as a streaming service.
However, Spotify is big on personalization. By knowing more about you, including your age and gender, the platform can recommend new music and playlists that are more suitable.
2. Gather data for advertising
One of Spotify’s revenue streams comes from paid advertisements and collaborations. So, it is important for them to know what gender you are, male or female.
Different companies have different products to sell, and not all of them are gender-neutral, right? Some products are made for men while some of them are for women.
To target the right audience with the right product, Spotify asks for your gender. This allows Spotify to deliver more relevant ads and measure their effectiveness.
Its privacy policy says Spotify can use your data for personalization, troubleshooting, developing new features and technology, marketing, and advertising, research, and for other legal reasons.
In fact, Spotify can also show targeted ads based on your mood and what you’re doing right now (via microphone access), as well as localized ads based on your street address.
What genders of users use Spotify?
Overall, Spotify has 44.8% female listeners, but only 22.6% of streams female or mixed-gender artists. Spotify has 55.2% male listeners. (Source)