Today we're excited to announce the 1.0 release of Gertrude Music, a parent-controlled music app for iPhone and iPad. A parent or accountability partner chooses which artists and albums are available. The listener gets a beautiful, full-featured music app—but no discovery feeds, recommendations, or access to music that wasn't approved.
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and other music apps are designed to help you find more. For most listeners, that's part of what makes them great: search an enormous catalog, follow recommendations, and move endlessly from one artist or album to the next.
But that design creates a problem when you want your child to enjoy music independently without putting an open music catalog at their fingertips and giving them access to the immense amount of explicit or otherwise inappropriate music available.
Even when a service offers an explicit-content filter, it doesn't let you choose exactly which music your child can access. And an explicit label answers only one narrow question. A song can be free of profanity and still contain themes your family isn't comfortable with. Meanwhile, search results, recommendations, autoplay, artist pages, and album artwork keep presenting music you haven't reviewed.
Gertrude Music is built on the same philosophy as the rest of our products: the only way to create something truly safe is to start with nothing and only add only what is known to be safe, rather than starting with everything and trying to block the bad parts. We built a platform that gives parents complete control over what music is available in the app, and then let parents decide what music is safe for their children rather than trying to decide that ourselves like other apps do.
From the Gertrude parents website, you search for music and choose what to make available. Those choices become the listener's entire music library. They can browse and search inside it, but there is no way to search an open music catalog, wander through a discovery feed, or follow recommendations into music you didn't select. You can also remove previously allowed music whenever you need to.
The result is a simple division of responsibility: you choose what is available; they choose what to play.
Although we usually describe this as a parent and child, the same approach works for teens or adults who want a trusted accountability partner to hold the boundary around their music choices.
We didn't want safety to make listening feel like a punishment. Gertrude Music gives the listener a polished, full-featured app for enjoying the library you've chosen. They can create playlists from their approved music library, edit and reorder the queue, search within their approved library, and so much more, all within a beautiful native app designed to delight.
Playlists give the listener room to make the library their own without becoming a backdoor to new music. A playlist never grants permission to play a song; everything in it must still come from the approved library.
Gertrude Music is available now in the App Store. Download it on the listener's iPhone or iPad, then follow the setup steps to connect the device to your Gertrude account. Once it's connected, use the parents website to choose the artists or albums you want to make available.
To use Gertrude Music, you need:
Gertrude Medium costs $5/month and covers Gertrude Music for every listener in your family. If you already subscribe to Gertrude Full, Music is included in your existing plan. The app itself is free to download, and Gertrude never shows ads.
You choose the music. They get a delightful listening app that shows only what you've approved—no discovery feeds or recommendations.
The Gertrude mac app helps you protect your kids online with strict internet filtering that you can manage from your own computer or phone, plus remote monitoring of screenshots and keylogging. $10/mo, with a 21 day free trial.
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