Yoto Music Box Is A Ray of Hope Amidst “Techlash”

When Ben Drury was shopping for his newborn at a department store in London, he saw something that made him cringe: There was an iPad holder on display in a stroller that occupied the baby.

“I remember reacting against it by saying, ‘No way, that’s really bad,'” he said. At that point, Mr. Drury wondered if he could create a technology product that would be rewarding for children, but not addictive.

That was 12 years ago. Around the same time, Mr. Drury, a digital music entrepreneur, also realized that with cassettes and compact discs long dead, the easiest way for parents to play audio for their children was to open an app on a touchscreen phone or tablet. A more developmentally appropriate gadget would have physical controls to help young children learn to use their hands.

Mr. Drury, now 50, and his business partner Filip Denker, 49, another new father at the time, set to work to create a product they believed parents desperately needed: a music player for children.

A device that would eventually be named Yoto Playeris a rubberized box that emits a sound from a speaker when a child inserts a card into the slot, much like a retro Nintendo that reads game cartridges.

With millions of devices sold, Yoto Player has since gained a cult following. Hundreds of her fans have even created Yoto accessories sold on Etsy, including Yoto card organizers and cup holders for carrying the player in a car seat. A competitor called Tonyboxanother screenless audio player for kids, is also gaining popularity.

Yoto, which has grown to nearly 250 employees scattered around the world, makes a small profit. (The company, which is expected to make about $768,000 in 2024, declined to share the latest sales figures but said it remains profitable.)

Yota’s success might sound like a feel-good story about a mission-driven company that gets rewarded for doing the right thing. But it’s also a sad reminder of what Silicon Valley used to be, before the tech industry became wildly out of touch with what people actually want from technology.

Today, in their quest for enormous growth and profits, rather than empowering people, most tech companies focus on developing products that keep people glued to their screens and hooked to apps, so they end up watching ads or paying subscriptions for the companies’ services.

In the past few years, widespread concerns about excessive screen time and the addictive nature of social media have culminated in cell phone bans in schools around the world, as well as thousands of lawsuits against tech giants. In March, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for causing harm by designing their products to be addictive. The next exam on digital addiction is due to start in July.

Recently, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have come under fire from child safety activists who fear the negative impact chatbots — which automatically write essays, do homework and offer therapy — could have on children’s education and mental health.

“Platforms built around algorithms and addictions aren’t built for kids — they’re built for profit,” said Jim Steyer, executive director of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reviews products for families. “Parent fatigue, overall technology fatigue, is very real.”

Still, Yoto shows that there are still ways for tech companies to make a living with honest intentions. The product, which started in 2017 as a crowd-funded project on Kickstarter, became a hit in 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The company now sells two sizes of music player, a smaller model called the Yoto Mini for $80 and a slightly larger Yoto Player for $110. However, it makes most of its profits from sound card sales, which are sold through Yoto’s website and stores like Amazon and Target. They usually cost $7 to $15 each.

Songs and audiobooks live on Yoto servers. Each card contains a digital key to unlock access to the tracks. The files are then downloaded to the player for offline listening. Parents can also purchase blank cards to link to their own audio tracks to upload to the Yoto cloud.

Popular cards include tunes from the movie “KPop Demon Hunters,” Queen, and even the Beatles, which is a big feat for such a small company considering that Steve Jobs and Apple spent years trying to bring the Beatles’ catalog to the iTunes Store due to a battle over the “Apple” trademark. (The Beatles founded the media company Apple Corps in the 1960s, long before Mr. Jobs started a computer company in his garage.)

It certainly helped that one of Yoto’s investors was Paul McCartney, whom Mr Drury met in 2019 through his contacts in the music industry. Yoto Player was in line with Mr McCartney’s interests as the Beatles star had written several children’s books.

In the 1990s, Mr. Drury started in the audio industry as a producer for Dotmusic, a music enthusiast site that was acquired by Yahoo in the early 2000s. In 2004, he founded 7digital, where he worked with Mr. Denker, co-founder of Yoto, to develop digital music applications for brands such as BlackBerry, Samsung and HTC.

Because of their experience working on music software, Mr. Drury and Mr. Denker focused most of their energy on developing the software for the Yoto player, keeping the hardware design as simple as possible. The device’s card reader slot was inspired by fathers finding that their children love to squeeze objects into other objects, Mr Drury said. The player also has two buttons, one for the child to select the audio track and the other to adjust the volume.

When I got the Yoto Mini as a hand-me-down from a friend about a month ago, I doubted I’d be impressed until my 22-month-old daughter picked it up and started inserting cards. I was ecstatic.

She immediately understood that each color-coded card was associated with different songs. This dad was proud that his little girl’s favorite band was the Beatles. (To tell you the truth, I was getting tired of listening to Spotify’s auto-recommended baby songs like “Baby Shark.”) Most of all, I loved that she was adding new words to her vocabulary, like “birthday” and “sunshine,” from songs she picked herself on Yoto.

Yoto prominently markets its music players as “screenless” devices, even though each has a miniature display. Small screens can display simple pixelated art and typography, such as a birthday cake icon referencing the Beatles’ “Birthday” or an audiobook chapter number.

Mr Drury said he called the feature a “pixel display” because it wasn’t a screen in the traditional sense as the company has come to know it.

“Is it something that is addictive in any way or would it require the child to focus on the image?” he asked. “Could it display TikTok? Could it display YouTube? If the answer is no, then it’s not a screen.”