How Gabb Music Curates Its Streaming Service for Kids and Families: ‘We’re Looking at Quality Over Quantity’

Posted On November 14, 2024November 15, 2024

Gabb Music is a music streaming service specifically developed for kids and families who have a Gabb Wireless phone — and the company is listening to its young audience as the platform continues to grow.

“Having the ability to build something from the ground up for kids was to me so appealing,” Kerri Fox-Metoyer, head of entertainment at Gabb Wireless, tells Billboard Family. “If you look at the marketplace, most of the other music services have been built for adults and then kind of re-engineered for kids, but we were building everything from the ground up for kids.”

On Nov. 14, Billboard presented the first Top Gabb Music Songs chart, a monthly chart provided by Gabb Wireless that tracks on-demand streams via the phone company’s Gabb Music platform, which features an extensive catalog of songs selected by the Gabb team that include only kid- and teen-appropriate content. Gabb Music streams are not currently factored into any other Billboard charts.

Based on data from the month of October 2024, Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” tops the first Top Gabb Music Songs chart as the most-played song on Gabb Wireless phones. The chart lists the 25 most-played songs of the month on Gabb phones.

Fox-Metoyer spoke with Billboard Family from Gabb Music’s Nashville base ahead of the launch of the Top Gabb Music Songs chart, in a conversation about how the streaming service came to be, and how it provides a song catalog tailored to young listeners and their families, with music appropriate for all ages and settings.

Gabb Wireless has been around since 2018, and its first products — mobile phones marketed as safe for kids to use, without internet access and with only kid-centered features — were available nationwide by September 2019. Music streaming was the feature requested most by parents of kids with Gabb phones, says Fox-Metoyer, who joined the company in 2020 and who’s held previous roles at companies involving digital music (Liquid Audio) and the family music space (Disney, Sony).

After researching options for streaming partners and realizing nothing quite fit the mission the company had in mind, the Gabb team decided to build its own platform.

“The streaming industry in general is about quantity, and we were looking for quality in our service for the kids,” Fox-Metoyer says.

And so came Gabb Music, which first launched in 2022 in the format of a DMCA-compliant radio service, with the intention to add the now-available, on-demand service Gabb Music+. Licensed with the three major labels — Universal, Sony and Warner — Gabb Music’s ad-free streaming platform offers songs from all genres and eras of music, not just songs found in the children’s category (a common misconception). But its song catalog is carefully filtered to meet the company’s vision.

Songs are generally filtered based on explicit language tags when it comes to streaming, but Gabb took a deeper look in determining if songs were really a fit for the specific service they’d developed for kids.

“When you take out the songs that have explicit lyrics, you’re left with a vast catalog of music that is — some of it still isn’t appropriate for our age group. We have kids as young as 6, and our kids go up to as old as 16, 17. It’s a real wide range,” Fox-Metoyer shares, adding that “the heart” of Gabb Music’s listeners are in the 8- to 12-year-old age range.

“So we had to look at that and say, just because this song doesn’t have the F-word, or other [explicit] words, is it appropriate for the age? That’s when we started to come up with our standards and guidelines. We said as a company, this is what we are going to allow and not allow,” she says.

So, what does Gabb Music allow and not allow on its platform?

“We’re looking at quality over quantity,” she explains. “We look at every piece of the music. When we do filtration, we don’t just filter lyrics. We also look at the name of the artist, we look at the name of the song, the name of the album, and we look at the album art.”

“As a parent, you can understand this,” she tells Billboard Family of Gabb’s concept of omitting songs that reference topics like violence, drug use, self harm and bullying, or “the things that may not have explicit lyrics, but they are just not age-appropriate for your kids. I think that is really our differentiator. The innuendos and adult subject matter that, through a proprietary filtration, we’re removing those songs from the service. We don’t edit — it just doesn’t appear on our service. I think that’s what parents love about it.”

She explains that parents can take a Gabb phone out of the box, activate it and give it to their kid without navigating various (and sometimes complicated) parental control settings, or “worrying about what they’re listening to or watching or seeing.” The phone itself has built-in filtration for its text and video messaging, and no internet browser or social media access — only its own app store, with Gabb-vetted options that parents can browse and choose to add for their child, if they’d like. Plus, it’s easy for parents to send messages via the phone, or flag content in the Gabb Music app, with feedback.

Beyond the phone itself being built as a kid-safe device, part of what makes its streaming platform different from other services is the Gabb product’s built-in audience of young listeners: “They’re helping us build it,” she says.

The team at Gabb is able to glean insights from Gabb Music’s list of top-played songs, plus the direct feedback the company receives from families with young music lovers, to continue to optimize the platform to best serve its audience’s needs.

“We’ve got a three-pillar programming mission: education, entertainment and discovery,” says Fox-Metoyer. “All of the programming that we do, we look at it through that lens. We want kids to learn things about music, we want them to obviously be entertained, and we want to help them discover what their musical taste is.”

The Gabb phone, and its music streaming service, is an alternate option for families who want to “take tech in steps,” she says. “These kids, sometimes this is their first experience being in the driver’s seat of their own music streaming account, so we have to educate them on how to build a playlist, what does skip mean, what does repeat mean, what does shuffle mean?”

She also brings up the trend of kids who don’t want to be attached to a device, but want to enjoy music throughout day-to-day activities like getting ready in the morning, hanging out with friends, playing outside, cooking with their parents, studying and chilling out: “There’s this whole new movement about kids kind of being vocal, almost taking the opposite of excessive screen time, and [saying], ‘No, I’m not gonna be on social media. I’m not gonna be tied to my phone. It’s really great to see kids taking back their youth, almost.”

Within Gabb Music’s varied catalog are playlists catered to a kid’s day, as well as their mood. Sleep and study playlists are popular, as is sad music: “One of them that is popular that is interesting — this was a request from a family — they wanted more sad music, just more mellow music.”

Gabb Music is also developing app offerings for its kid listeners that tie together music streaming and music education, like playlists highlighting an instrument or demonstrating what BPM is.

Of course, while kids and teens who stream through Gabb can come across music that’s new to them, they do also still “gravitate toward the hits,” she says. “They love Benson Boone, they love Taylor Swift, they love Imagine Dragons.”

What if someone searches for a popular song that does not meet Gabb Music’s guidelines, and therefore can’t be found on the app? They’re given alternate suggestions and the chance to discover more music they might like, instead of hitting a roadblock.

“We try to present songs that we do have [from the artist]. We try to respond in a positive way. Here’s 10 other songs that we have,” she says, later adding in our conversation, “We’re adding new music every day.”

Looking ahead, Gabb Music hopes to be a go-to music platform not only for families at home, but also a helpful option for kid-centered community events: “We have had inquiries from not only teachers, and schools, but also youth group leaders, a Scouts group … Not only for the education of music, but also, ‘I play music for my kids during our events and I have a hard time putting together a playlist that’s appropriate for these events,’” she says. “We’re are looking at how to solve those problems in 2025.”

Coming up soon for Gabb is its fun CEO for the Day program, which was just announced for Dec. 3, when a 9-year-old will get to take over the role at the Gabb Wireless headquarters in Lehi, Utah. The opportunity will allow her to attend meetings and brainstorming sessions with executives, pitch her own marketing ideas and more. Gabb Music listeners can celebrate the special day with a playlist titled “Boss Beats,” full of uplifting and empowering songs.