A few months ago, a Reddit user made a disturbing discovery: his 14-year-old brother had been saving sexually explicit audio clips on Spotify. The playlists were innocuously titled “Good pods,” “Follow for more,” and “Requests.” None carried any warning that they weren’t meant for children.
When the brother tried to report the content, the process proved "extremely frustrating". For each piece of content, he had to verify his email, enter a code, complete multiple “are you human?” checks, and select the reason for his complaint.
His frustration wasn’t unique. Reddit is filled with similar threads. In one, a user searching for Cher’s 1966 hit “Bang Bang” instead found a list of sexually explicit videos. “I just wanted to listen to a song,” they wrote. “What the hell is this?”
On the thread, former Spotify employees weighed in, admitting the reporting process is slow, flawed, and easy for explicit material to slip through.
In India—Spotify’s second-largest market—the problem is bigger than bad search results. There’s no Spotify Kids app, no effective age checks, and no law forcing platforms to filter explicit audio. As Decode found, even the most innocent search terms can serve up sexually explicit material, often with suggestive thumbnails.
With cheap data, rising smartphone use, and no parental controls, millions of Indian children can browse the same unfiltered audio library as adults.
An Open Door To Adult Content
Spotify, one of the world’s largest streaming platforms, boasts over 40 million active users in India. And yet, explicit sexual content isn’t tucked away in some obscure niche.
Type "bedtime stories" or "ASMR" into the search bar, and explicit content can appear alongside legitimate results. Search for anything more suggestive, and thousands of adult audio tracks surface, in multiple languages, without warnings, accessible to anyone with an email address.
For Indian children, the risks are amplified. Unlike users in countries like the UK, where Spotify must verify ages before allowing access to explicit material, India has no such safeguards.
The consequences ripple through families and schools across the country. Child psychologist Indu Punj recalled, to Decode, three young girls at a government school who began skipping classes after older boys paid them to watch explicit videos together. The girls had discovered how to use Google's audio search to find such content in Hindi, driven by curiosity but lacking any context to understand what they were encountering.
"Children are naturally curious," Punj explains, "and exposure to easily available sexual content often fuels that curiosity. Even kids as young as 6 to 12 can show signs of sexual awareness."
Without understanding what they're seeing or hearing, she says, children "often explore harmful material out of curiosity, which can be dangerous."
How Easy Is It To Find Porn On Spotify?
Decode found out that even innocent search terms like "storytelling," "bedtime sounds," or "clapping" could surface explicit material, though usually buried in results. More direct searches revealed extensive libraries of sexually explicit audio—detailed with graphic visuals.
Anyone of any age can access any of these content.
During our investigation, Decode also discovered a wide range of Hindi-language adult stories, including graphic narrations of extramarital affairs and complex relationships. Many contained highly explicit content, sometimes paired with provocative thumbnails, often narrated in a casual tone. These ranged from first-person accounts to third-person storytelling, focusing on marital dissatisfaction and intimate experiences.
Some of these collections were titled ‘Hindi 18+ audio stories,’ ‘Illegal relationships,’ and ‘Crime narratives,’ with episodes lasting 10 to 20 minutes.
Additionally, numerous audio files were purely erotic sounds—moaning and other intimate noises—monetised through advertising despite their adult nature.
The Upload Economy
Decode found that some creators had uploaded multiple audio clips, with a few maintaining a strong presence on YouTube and Instagram. There, they repurpose similar content—sometimes toned down, other times amplified with accompanying videos.
Some creators had monetised this content through advertising, despite its adult nature. Others included payment links such as UPI IDs, requesting listener contributions to support ongoing production. Some “adult bedtime story" collections had fewer followers but individual episodes were saved or shared over a thousand times, indicating substantial audiences—with no way to determine how many were minors.
Uploading music or audio content to Spotify isn’t done directly by creators but through third-party distributors like RouteNote or TuneCore. These distributors have guidelines to block illegal or inappropriate content and require creators to agree not to upload explicit or harmful material. However, enforcement varies evidently, and explicit audio regularly slips through initial checks.
The bigger challenge, though, is Spotify’s largely reactive moderation system. The moderation system depends on community reports and rights holders to flag explicit or harmful content after it goes public. There are no automated systems scanning for age-appropriateness before listeners can access material. If no one flags it, it stays live—sometimes for months.
This gap is particularly concerning in India, where the platform lacks the additional protections found elsewhere.
The contrast with the United Kingdom is striking. Under the Online Safety Act 2023, Spotify must verify a user’s age before allowing access to explicit material. It plans to do so through Yoti, a digital identity firm that uses facial recognition scans or government ID uploads. If users fail or refuse verification, their accounts can be restricted or deleted.
While the UK model has sparked debates about biometric privacy, India’s lack of comparable safeguards leaves young listeners wide open to harmful material—raising urgent questions about content moderation, legal responsibility, and digital safety in one of the world’s fastest-growing streaming markets.
Although Spotify’s policies prohibit illegal or hateful content, enforcement is delayed and complaint-driven, allowing inappropriate material to circulate unchecked for long periods.
Spotify’s terms require users to be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age in their country) and, for minors, to have parental consent. But there’s no reliable verification, so kids can just enter a fake birth date and simply hit “play”. The company also distances itself from liability for underage sign-ups, leaving parents to shoulder the risk.
In India, the absence of safeguards, combined with cheap data and exploding smartphone access, means millions of children are browsing a vast, unfiltered library daily.
The Legal Loophole
When it comes to protecting children from explicit audio content, Indian laws remain unclear.
Tech lawyer Alvin Antony told Decode that the IT Rules, 2021 require platforms to block children’s access to harmful or obscene content but mainly focus on videos and don’t explicitly cover audio-only material.
He alluded to a 2020 Rajya Sabha Committee report which recommended including audio content explicitly in these rules, pointing out a “legal grey area” where audio often escapes oversight.
Antony also noted that under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, using sexual words or sounds with a child can be considered harassment, but proving intent is tricky. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 also has age-check provisions to prevent kids from seeing harmful content.
In practice, however, these protections aren’t widely enforced, Antony pointed out.
While Spotify is encouraged to use age restrictions and labels, Antony warned, “There’s no strong legal requirement forcing platforms to have strict filters or parental controls for explicit audio in India.”
Urging for better laws and stronger enforcement, the lawyer said, “There’s no clear law defining harmful audio content or how to moderate it.” He added that AI tools “struggle to distinguish educational from obscene content,” and India lacks enough experts to properly review such material.
The Human Cost
While laws fall short, the easy availability of explicit content on popular platforms like Spotify is especially troubling in a society where comprehensive sex education remains taboo.
Child psychologist Punj shared another concerning example: young boys casually discussing rape after the Kolkata RG Kar case, influenced by “sexual content they'd encountered without proper context”.
She emphasised that audio content can impact children's imagination as powerfully as visual material—perhaps more so.
"Audio content allows children to use their imagination, which can sometimes be more impactful than visual content," Punj said.
Many children, especially in crowded, low-income homes, lack privacy or supervision, increasing their vulnerability.
While parents have a right to protect their children, Punj cautioned this should be done sensitively, watching for signs like secretive device use. Without proper education and supervision, she warned, easy access to explicit content can lead to “addiction, confusion, and risky behaviour”.
“The key is awareness and education,” she said. “Talking openly, providing age-appropriate guidance, and supporting children helps prepare them to make informed decisions when they’re ready.”
The challenge extends beyond content moderation to monetisation. While major record labels earn revenue through Spotify's ad-supported and subscription tiers, India is excluded from official programmes that let individual creators earn directly from ads or subscriptions. This limited financial accountability within Spotify's local ecosystem reduces incentives for Indian creators to carefully moderate their content.
In fact, it has become a motive for them to gain more listeners and plug their own individual bank accounts, to make some quick money.
Meanwhile, the complaint process itself presents barriers. Users attempting to report inappropriate content face lengthy verification processes.
“As enforcement is slow, harmful content often reaches kids before anything is done. Plus, since platforms like Spotify operate worldwide, different countries have different rules, making enforcement even trickier in India,” Antony said.
Decode has reached out to Spotify. This story will be updated if and when we receive a response.
