Why I built Songkrate
My daughter came home singing a song she'd heard at school and asked if she could listen to it. Easy request. We pay for Apple Music, the song is on Apple Music, she has an iPad. Every piece of this problem was already solved, and somehow the honest answer was still "let me think about it."
Because here's what "yes" actually meant. It meant handing her an app with a hundred million songs in it, a search bar, an algorithm that learns what you tap, and a recommendations feed built to keep you tapping. There's an explicit content filter, and I turned it on, and I wrote up exactly how far that gets you. Short version, not far. The filter bleeps words. It doesn't have opinions about anything else, and everything else is the part I care about.
So my options were sit next to her for every song, or hand over the fire hydrant and hope. I didn't like either one, and I kept thinking about how this problem did not exist when I was a kid.
The crate
When I was growing up, music at home had a shape. There was a pile of records and tapes and CDs, and what was in the pile was in the house, and that was the whole system. Your parents didn't stand between you and the music. They didn't have to. The boundary was built in, and inside it you had total freedom. You could grab anything, play it loud, play it forty times, develop weird taste, fall in love with something nobody else liked. Some of my best musical memories are exactly that, digging through what was already there.
Streaming deleted the boundary. It kept the freedom and connected it to everything ever recorded, plus a machine whose whole job is suggesting the next thing. For adults that's the product working as intended. For a seven-year-old it's a door to the entire world with a sticker on it that says "clean."
I didn't want to take music away from my kids. I wanted the crate back.
So I built it
Songkrate is that crate, rebuilt on top of the Apple Music subscription your family already pays for. You browse the full catalog on your phone and add what you approve, song by song, album by album. Your kids get their own player on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV with their own profiles, their own playlists, their own favorites, and exactly the music you said yes to. Inside the crate they're completely free. Outside the crate doesn't exist.
Also, some hard rules, on purpose. No ads, ever. No discovery feed pulling from the open catalog. Your kids never sign in, never type anything personal, never see something an engagement metric picked for them. Maybe someday we build something that helps a kid find their next favorite song inside their own crate, and honestly that could be cool. But the rule underneath doesn't move: nothing gets in that you didn't put there. The only way music enters the crate is you.
Who's behind this
Me. One dad in Puerto Rico. No investors, no growth team, no engagement dashboards to juice. My family uses Songkrate every day, which means bugs that annoy your kids annoy mine first. You pay five bucks a month, I keep building. That's the whole business model, and I like it that way.
If any of this sounds like your house, try it. The trial is free and cancelling is one tap, Apple makes sure of that. And if something's off, or you want a feature, or you just want to tell me what your kid's first favorite album was, email me at [email protected]. It's really me reading it.
Songkrate turns the Apple Music you already pay for into a kid-safe music player. You pick every song, your kids press play. Start here.
Try it with your own kids
Songkrate turns the Apple Music you already pay for into a player that only has the songs you approved. Free trial, then $4.99/month.
Download on the App Store