Family Tech Blog

Category: music

  • Monitor Song Lyrics with Bark!

    Monitor Song Lyrics with Bark!

    Listen to any of the current top ten songs and you’ll find all sorts of content that may not be considered appropriate for children. Profanity, sexual content, violence, and suicidal ideation abound in today’s popular music. How can we, as parents, keep an eye on what our children are listening to without having to go through and read lyrics for every song on every playlist? Bark is offering a pretty good solution with their latest update. The AI-based message monitoring system now monitors lyrics on Spotify.

    Connecting your accounts to Bark is pretty simple with the Android app but demands a bit more tech expertise to connect to iOS (due to Apple’s strict anti-monitoring policies.) You have to download Bark’s software to your computer and then set your child’s iPad or iPhone to back up to that same computer in order for Bark to monitor the device. Spotify, however, connects on the account level which means set up is a simple as logging in to Spotify and giving Bark permission to access data in the app. That does mean that shared accounts will be monitored as one so your listening habits will be monitored as well and then reported to you as if your kids listened. We raised our Spotify subscription to the 14.99 price in order to set up separate accounts for our kids. This means they can be monitored separately giving us more accurate reports.

    Reports from Bark are notifications about specific songs with the lyrics listed along with recommendations for discussing the songs with your children. We saw immediately that some of the songs our son was listening to had some lyrics that were a bit more violent than we would approve of. We were able to discuss this with him and he removed them from one of his playlists immediately. The songs were in no way “explicit” since we have turned off access to explicit content on his Spotify app but the Bark system allows you to set the sensitivity so that it will report songs that even hint at innuendo, violence, or other adult content. Our approach is to always err on the side of caution so we have sensitivity turned all the way up.

    Bark’s message monitoring has also resulted in quality conversations with our children, even within just a few days of activating the software. We were notified that our daughter had been “bullied.” It turned out she was just telling her brother to stop texting her over and over again. The AI noticed that she was asking him to stop and he was continuing to message her and it flagged it. That is EXACTLY the kind of thing we want to be notified of. Her brother was just being annoying but if that was some older boy asking for pictures or a friend telling her something inappropriate or mean, we want to be notified. For us, a false alarm is evidence that the software is working and we are happy to weed through false reports so that we’ll be sure to get the one that could save us and our children from a lot of trouble.

    Song lyrics, videos, messages, and social media posts are helping shape our kids’ worldviews. We should be on guard against the kinds of content that don’t meet our family’s standards. Bark allows you to do that without your kids’ privacy being interfered with. You don’t see all their messages, just the ones that Bark flags as potential dangers. This means they can have their phone or tablet, message their friends, watch their shows, and listen to their music without you always asking what they’re doing. You won’t have to ask because you’ll be alerted if they do something you don’t approve of. Just remember that we never recommend spying on our kids without their knowledge. Talk with them about Bark and any other software you use to report content. Let them know why you are using the software and talk with them about any reports you receive. This is how we help them build a healthy attitude towards tech.

    You can get Bark by clicking THIS LINK, using the promo code: BF56WBD, or clicking the banner near the top of this article. We are an affiliate of Bark and will receive a small donation when you pay Bark for your subscription. Thank you for protecting your kids and for supporting this blog and our ministry.

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  • Old Town Road Proves How Much Memes are Shaping Our Culture

    Old Town Road Proves How Much Memes are Shaping Our Culture

    Montero Lamar Hill spent days and days in his closet recording music. He would take samples from YouTube and lay his own lyrics over them. Then he would post his songs to the popular music site Soundcloud and start sharing on social media. At 20 years old, Montero didn’t have a job, he was focused solely on his music and hoped that some day his hustle would pay off. In March 2019 one of his songs, a trap beat with some country banjo and silly lyrics, went viral as a Tik Tok meme and less than a month later Old Town Road by Lil NasX was on the Country Music Charts. 

    The song was pulled from the Country charts because it “wasn’t country enough,” but it had garnered some attention from producers in LA and Nashville. Soon, Billy Ray Cyrus got involved and the Old Town Road Remix was born. The duet is now the most popular song in the world and NasX’s life is completely different. Some of the latest stories about NasX include his purchase of a luxury sports car for Billy Ray, and the fact that he’s moving into an extravagant new apartment. You can’t go anywhere without hearing Old Towne Road and everyone from kids to adults, urban to suburban, city to country folk all know the song and most of us like it at least a little bit. All of this was made possible because of social media influencers and the viral nature of short music videos on apps like Tik Tok.

    What Parents Should Know

    This story is interesting from an internet safety standpoint because it highlights the capability of social media and viral media to shape the offline culture. When Tik Tok was Musical.ly, the app allowed you to make short lip sync videos to popular songs. While much of Tik Tok still centers around that model, there are so many influencers making original content and using music or soundtracks from other places that the content on Tik Tok is now becoming a pop chart in itself. Old Town Road  is a great example of how content on social media can get so popular that it becomes main stream based solely on the sheer force of its popularity. The lines between internet fame and mainstream fame are blurring more and more.

    There has always been a gap between the culture kids are living in and the culture that their parents remember and understand. We try to keep our fingers on the pulse of society but often have a hard time keeping up. In some cases this is no big deal. We don’t always need to know what their latest slang phrase means or where that dance move came from. It is, however, important to understand the big picture of how our kids’ culture is shaped and how their influences shape the mainstream society as a whole. Many parents see Tik Tok and other social media apps as little programs that our children use to have fun with their friends or express themselves but we have to curb that attitude and remember that these services are now some of the most influential driving forces in our culture. Old Town Road is a trendy, catchy song that won’t last super long and is fairly family friendly but the next “big thing” could be a politically driven stance against something your family stands for or for something your family stands firmly against.

    The days of social media being mere expression on an island of youth sub culture is over. These viral videos and memes are shaping the culture that we all live in, not just that of our children.

    Listen to this article on the Family Tech Update podcast below:

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