How Gabb Music curates its streaming service for kids and families: 'We're looking for quality over quantity'

Gabb Music is a music streaming service built specifically for kids and families with 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 so appealing to me,” says Kerri Fox-Metoyer, head of entertainment at Gabb Wireless. Billboard Family. “If you look at the market, most of the other music services have been built for adults and then re-engineered for kids, but we built everything from the ground up for kids.”

On November 14, Bulletin board introduced the first Top Gabb Music Songs chart, a monthly chart provided by Gabb Wireless that tracks on-demand streams through the telco's Gabb Music platform, featuring an extensive catalog of songs selected by the Gabb team that includes only kids and teen appropriate content. Currently, Gabb Music streams do not count against others Bulletin board diagrams.

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

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

Gabb Wireless has been around since 2018, and its first products — mobile phones marketed as child-safe, with no internet access and only kid-centric features — were available nationwide by September 2019. Music streaming was the most requested feature by parents of kids with Gabb phones, says Fox-Metoyer, who joined the company in 2020 and who had previous roles at digital music companies (Liquid Audio) and the family music area (Disney, Sony).

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

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

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

Songs are generally filtered based on clear language tags when it comes to streaming, but Gabb looked deeper to determine if the songs were actually appropriate for the particular service they had developed for kids.

“When you take out the songs that have clear lyrics, you're left with a huge 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 16, 17. It's a wide range,” shares Fox-Metoyer, adding that “the heart” of Gabb Music's listeners is between the 8 and 12-year age range.

“So we had to look at it and say, just because this song doesn't have the F word or whatever [explicit] words, is it age appropriate? That's when we started coming up with our standards and guidelines. We said as a company, this is what we will allow and we will not allow that,” he says.

So, what does and doesn't Gabb Music allow on its platform?

“We look at quality over quantity,” he explains. “We look at every piece of music. When we filter, we don't just filter lyrics. We also look at the artist name, we look at the song name, the album name and we look at the album art.”

“As a parent, you can understand that,” she says Billboard Family of Gabb's idea of ​​omitting songs that deal with topics like violence, drug use, self-harm and bullying, or “things that might not have clear lyrics, but just aren't age-appropriate for your kids. I think that's really our differentiator. The innuendos and adult theme that, through an exclusive filtering, we remove these songs from the service. We don't edit — it just doesn't appear on our service. I think parents like that.”

He explains that parents can take a Gabb phone out of the box, turn it on and give it to their child without navigating various (and sometimes complicated) parental control settings or “worrying about what they're hearing, seeing or seeing ». The phone itself has built-in filtering for text and video messaging and has no web browser or social media access — just its own app store, with options vetted by Gabb that parents can browse and choose to add for their child if they like it. Plus, it's easy for parents to send messages over 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 Gabb's product's built-in audience of young listeners: “They help us build it,” he says.

The Gabb team is able to gather insights from Gabb Music's top playlist, as well as the direct feedback the company receives from families with young music lovers, to continue to optimize the platform to better serve needs of its audience.

“We have a three-pronged programming mission: education, entertainment and discovery,” says Fox-Metoyer. “All the programming we do, we see it through that lens. We want kids to learn about music, we want them to have fun obviously, and we want to help them discover what their musical taste is.”

The Gabb phone, and its music streaming service, is an alternative option for families who want to “step up technology,” he says. “These kids, sometimes this is their first experience of being in the driver's seat of their own music streaming account, so we have to educate them on how to create a playlist, what skip means, what repeat means, what stirring; ”

It also highlights the trend of kids who don't want connected to a device but wants to enjoy music in everyday activities like getting ready in the morning, hanging out with friends, playing outside, cooking with their parents, studying and relaxing: “There's a whole new movement about kids being vocals, getting almost the opposite of too much screen time, and [saying]”No, I won't be on social media. I will not be tied to my phone. It's really great to see kids getting their youth back, almost.”

In Gabb Music's diverse catalog there are playlists that cover a child's day, as well as their mood. Sleep and study playlists are popular, as is sad music: “One of the things that's popular that's interesting — this was a request from a family — they wanted more sad music, just more sweet music.”

Gabb Music is also developing app offerings for its young listeners that combine music streaming and music education, such as playlists that highlight an instrument or show what BPM is.

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

What if someone searches for a popular song that doesn't meet Gabb Music's guidelines and therefore can't be found in the app? They are given alternative suggestions and the opportunity to discover more music they might like, instead of finding a barrier.

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

Looking to the future, Gabb Music hopes to be a popular music platform not only for families at home, but also a useful option for child-focused community events: “We've had inquiries not only from teachers and schools, but also from groups of youth leaders , a group of Boy Scouts… Not only for music education, but also, “I play music for my kids during our events and I struggle to make a playlist that is appropriate for these events,” he says. “We're looking at how to solve these problems in 2025.”

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