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‘It’s basically inaccessible without a phone’: are kids losing their love for music?

Children used to obsessively put CDs and 7-inches on repeat, but streaming means they need digital devices and parental permission to play music. And there’s little being done to help

The American seven-year-old Miles Bonham has 2.7 million Instagram followers for his wonderful videos of beat-making and songwriting – but he’s doing it on ProTools with an array of mics, synths and more that would be prohibitively expensive for most families, and hollowed-out youth clubs will also struggle. Over each seven-minute episode, we follow the eponymous hero as she jams with a new animal pal in her garden, played by the likes of Wet Leg – as a travelling troupe of snails called the Slime Sisters – plus Mercury prize-winning jazz group Ezra Collective and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo. Photograph: RobloxA pre-phone child is more likely to forge a strong connection with gaming, given that something such as a Nintendo Switch – sealed off from the potentially dangerous open internet – is a safer device than one that can access Spotify.

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