Kids Can’t Participate in Apple Music Collaborative Playlists

After a couple of false starts, Apple finally rolled out one of its last promised iOS 17 features earlier this month, with Collaborative Playlists in Apple Music making their public debut in iOS 17.3.

The feature briefly appeared in the early iOS 17.2 betas in late October but mysteriously vanished in the fourth beta and was nowhere to be found in the final iOS 17.2 release. Two days later, Apple announced it would be delayed into 2024.

Although collaborative playlists worked quite well in the first three iOS 17.2 betas, it seemed Apple pulled the feature due to some security concerns. At the time, these seemed to center around the possibility of the technique being used as a vector for spam attacks, similar to how we’ve seen iCloud Calendar invitations abused.

However, it seems Apple was also concerned with ensuring younger users were protected from potential problems that might come from receiving random playlist invites. While it wasn’t the case in the betas, the release version of iOS 17.3 prevents users under age 13 from creating or joining collaborative playlists.

Some folks have already run into this problem, but it turns out that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. In a support document published this week, Apple has confirmed that “Children under the age of 13 can’t collaborate on playlists.”

This restriction is in place regardless of whether the child in question is in a Family Sharing group. While it may be disappointing for families — I’d be let down if my daughter was still under 13 — it’s sort of understandable with the way collaborative playlists have been designed.

To make the feature as useful as possible, Apple has made it as non-restrictive as possible. Collaborative playlist invitations can be shared by link as far and wide as you like, from your own circle of friends to your entire realm of Instagram followers, and the only requirement for someone to join is that they be an Apple Music subscriber.

While Apple allows the playlist creator to approve who joins, it’s still not hard to see how this raises some safety concerns. Even in a Family Sharing group with Screen Time restrictions, there’s no realistic way to prevent kids from joining any shared playlist they happen to come across on the internet. Parental controls should prevent them from seeing any explicit content in those playlists, but they’d still be able to participate and swap songs with random strangers.

The obvious solution to this would be for Apple to provide enhanced parental controls; ideally, these would allow parents to limit which shared playlists their kids can join or at least approve any requests. At a bare minimum, Apple could have at least provided a switch in Screen Time to allow parents to decide if their offspring should be permitted to join Collaborative Playlists.

However, we’re hoping this isn’t Apple’s final word on the matter. Our guess is that Apple was forced to choose between rolling out Collaborative Playlists now for those over 13 or delaying them to iOS 17.4 or later while it worked on building and testing the necessary parental controls. Sadly, we’ve seen no evidence in the first beta that this is about to change in iOS 17.4, but that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t working on a way to bring this feature to its younger fans.