ID Required: The New Age of Music Censorship and Control

Aug 5

This summer, Spotify flipped the switch on a new policy in the UK: If you want to listen to music labeled “explicit”, you better show them your face or your government ID.

Seriously. A video selfie or passport upload, just to hear the music you already have saved in your library.

This is, in part, is them complying with the UK’s Online Safety Act, a law written with one hand on the “protect the children” book and the other on your front-facing camera. But make no mistake; this isn’t about safety. It’s about control and the unfortunate death of small independent music as we know and love it.

You don’t get to call yourself “the home of music” if you’re gatekeeping that music behind biometric scans and data collection. No sane person asked for this. And the idea that facial recognition and ID uploads are somehow a “normal” part of our everyday life and streaming is clinical. That’s a narrative cooked up be the lawyers, boardroom execs and control hungry politicians, not real music fans. They assure us that the data is “deleted” after verification? But are we really supposed to just take their word for it? Not only that but these third-party verification companies are notoriously horrible with their own back-end security with leaks and breaches that seem to be in the news almost daily it feels like.

Big music labels and executives would have you think that streaming killed piracy. You really want to keep piracy down and protect artists? Give people a platform that doesn’t treat them like suspects from the jump. This kind of crackdown just drives users off Spotify and back into the the old tools: VPNs, torrents, ripped MP3s, and giving your parents family computer cancer on LimeWire. This means less discovery, no royalties, and no artist data to work with. Everyone loses, except the companies pretending to fix something with the data they claim they delete (but let’s be real, it’s more likely sold to the highest bidder just like all the other markers of your internet fingerprints like cookies and your emails).

My United States friends, think this is just a UK problem? Think again.

YouTube is rolling out AI-driven age checks in the U.S. starting August 13th, 2025. Their systems can override your entered birthdate based on behavior, watch history, and “other signals”. What if they decide you look or seem underage? Well, say goodbye to “not for kids” content unless you fork over an ID, credit card, or selfie.

This isn’t just creeping into our backyard, it’s already here. And tech companies don’t want regional-by-region rules whenever they can. They’ll usually pick the most restrictive policy and apply it everywhere, especially if they’re not the ones having to store the massive amounts of data and do the checks themselves. It’s cheaper and easier for them, which is always the name of the game for these big corporations.

There's and old Mark Twain quote about this:

| “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

This is still true today but I’d give it a little modern day twist:

| “It’s like cancelling the concert because someone brought their baby without earplugs.”

That’s what we’re dealing with here. Platforms and lawmakers passing sweeping restrictions, not because everyone’s at risk, but because they see us and our voice as the risk. Music is just the test case. But once we’re all mindlessly conforming to this kind of ID-checking for “sensitive” content, don’t be surprised when it hits podcasts, e-books, video streaming, or anything else that isn’t scrubbed squeaky clean. It’s a slow erosion of access and it starts with rules like this. And while it’s easy to dunk on Spotify or YouTube or any other company enacting verifications like this, we have to be real. These companies didn’t wake up one day and decide to demand selfies and passports for bass drops. If this were the case they would have done it long ago. They’re following laws, horribly flawed, controlling laws, handed down by politicians who don’t understand digital culture, music, or the real consequences of blanket enforcement. Or maybe, it’s worse that they do understand how horrible this will be for all of us.

We’re not just watching corporations overreach in the name of profit margins, we’re watching them fumble to obey rules they didn’t write, ones crafted by people who think the internet is a threat to be neutralized, not a space to be navigated. It’s about being able to come back and find you when you disagree or disobey. It’s about muzzling artists who speak their minds.

But enough of “big brother” sucks and will always suck. How does this affect artists? And who will it effect most?

Underground and smaller artists would and will feel the ramifications first. These are the artists building their own scenes and reaching the kind of listeners who need to hear something raw. These walls kill the journey before it even starts. And for artists, especially the indie and underground ones, this isn’t just some small policy tweak. It’s a straight-up gutting. Less access = fewer streams = fewer fans = less money. It all crumbles very quickly. Now, that connection is possibly being severed in the name of control. Explicit tags show up everywhere in the music that matters and that pushes culture; hip hop, punk, grime, industrial, metal, pop, even country almost no genre is safe from this.

We’re all paying in some way, artist and listeners alike.

Okay, enough “woe is me”. What can we actually do then?

Buy music direct - Bandcamp, artists websites, indie labels etc.
Get physical - Vinyl, CD’s, tapes, even MP3 players are making a comeback. No login or face scans required.
Support creators on Patreon, Ko-fi or more importantly at their live shows.
Build community - support playlists, build Discord servers, share zines, follow artists on platforms they control and own or that don’t require you to give up so much in the way of privacy.
Resist convenience when it costs you control. Spotify, YouTube and your government should work for you and exist because of you. Not the other way around.

This isn’t just about political ideology or stance on privacy alone. This is about freedom. Freedom of access, of taste, of artistic connection. The tighter these companies and governments squeeze, the more we all lose. Not just our playlists, but the joy of stumbling into something loud, wild, weird, and real.

The more barriers we build around music, the more we lose what made music worth finding in the first place.

Here’s the TL;DR: Spotify (in the UK) now requires face scans or ID uploads to access explicit content, thanks to new government regulations, and YouTube is rolling out similar policies in the US this August. What’s being sold as “safety” is actually sweeping surveillance and control that punishes every user in the name of control and greed and under the false ideology of “safety & protecting our children online”.

This isn’t just a privacy issue, it’s a cultural one. These restrictions kill music discovery, hurt indie artists, and push people back toward piracy. It’s a slow, quiet lockdown on the raw, messy, uncensored music scenes that actually matter.

We shouldn’t have to show our faces just to hear someone scream.