When Ben Drury was shopping for his newborn at a department store in London, he saw something that made him grimace: A stroller on display had a holder for an iPad to keep an infant occupied.
“I remember having this visceral reaction against that, saying, ‘No way, this is really bad,’” he said. In that moment, Mr. Drury wondered whether there was a technology product he could create that was enriching for children but not addictive.
That was 12 years ago. Around the same time, Mr. Drury, a digital music entrepreneur, also realized that with cassette tapes and compact discs now long dead, the simplest way for parents to play audio for their children was to open an app on a phone or tablet with a touch-screen. A more developmentally appropriate gadget would have physical controls to help little ones learn to use their hands.
So Mr. Drury, now 50, and his business partner, Filip Denker, 49, another newly minted father at the time, got to work creating a product that they felt parents desperately needed: a music player for children.
The device, which would eventually be named the Yoto Player, is a rubber-encased box that emits audio from a speaker when a child inserts a card into a slot, similar to a retro Nintendo that reads game cartridges.
With millions of devices sold, the Yoto Player has since gained a cult following. Hundreds of its fans have even crafted Yoto accessories sold on Etsy, including Yoto card organizers and cup holders for carrying the player in a car seat. A competitor called the Toniebox, another screenless audio player for children, is also gaining traction.
Yoto, which has grown to nearly 250 employees scattered across the globe, makes a small profit. (The company, which earned about $768,000 in profit in 2024, declined to share more recent sales figures but said it continued to be profitable.)
Yoto’s success may sound like a feel-good story about a mission-driven company that is being rewarded for doing the right thing. But it’s also a sad reminder of what Silicon Valley once was before the tech industry grew wildly out of touch with what people actually want from technology.
Nowadays, rather than empower people, most tech companies, in their pursuit of enormous growth and profit, are more focused on developing products that keep people glued to screens and hooked on apps so that they will eventually look at ads or pay a subscription fee for companies’ services.
In the last few years, widespread concern over excessive screen time and the addictive nature of social media has culminated in cellphone bans in schools around the world, as well as thousands of lawsuits against the tech giants. In March, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for causing harm by designing their products to be addictive. Another trial related to digital addiction is expected to begin in July.
More recently, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have come in the cross hairs of child safety activists concerned about the negative effect of chatbots — which automatically write essays, do homework and offer therapy — on education and children’s mental health.
“Platforms built on algorithms and addiction are not built for children — they’re built for revenue,” said Jim Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reviews products for families. “The parental fatigue, the overall fatigue from tech, is very real.”
Yet the Yoto illustrates that there are still ways for tech companies to make a living with wholehearted intentions. The product, which began in 2017 as a crowd-funded project on Kickstarter, started becoming a hit in 2020, at the cusp of the coronavirus pandemic.
The company now sells two sizes of the music player, a smaller model called the Yoto Mini for $80 and the slightly larger Yoto Player for $110. But it makes most of its profit from sales of audio cards, which are sold through Yoto’s website and stores like Amazon and Target. They typically cost $7 to $15 each.
Songs and audiobooks live on Yoto’s servers. Each card contains a digital key to unlock access to the tracks. The files are then downloaded onto the player for offline listening. Parents can also buy blank cards to link to their own audio tracks that they upload to Yoto’s cloud.
Popular cards include tunes from the movie “KPop Demon Hunters,” the band Queen and even the Beatles, a major feat for a company this small, considering that Steve Jobs and Apple struggled for many years to bring the Beatles catalog to the iTunes Store because of a fight over the “Apple” trademark. (The Beatles founded the media firm 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 connections in the music industry. The Yoto Player aligned with Mr. McCartney’s interests because the Beatles star had written several children’s books.
In the 1990s, Mr. Drury got his start in the audio industry working as a producer for Dotmusic, a music enthusiast site that Yahoo acquired in the early 2000s. In 2004, he founded 7digital, where he worked with Mr. Denker, Yoto’s co-founder, on developing digital music apps for brands like 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 and kept the hardware design as simple as possible. The device’s card-reader slot was inspired by the fathers’ realization that their infants loved cramming objects inside other objects, Mr. Drury said. The player also has two knobs, one for a child to select an audio track and the other to adjust volume.
When I received a Yoto Mini as a hand-me-down from a friend about a month ago, I was doubtful I would be impressed, until my 22-month-old daughter picked it up and began inserting cards. I was ecstatic.
She immediately grasped that each colorfully labeled card was associated with different songs. This dad felt proud that his little girl’s favorite band was the Beatles. (Truth be told, I was getting tired of listening to the children’s songs automatically recommended by Spotify, like “Baby Shark.”) Above all, I loved that she was adding new words to her vocabulary, like “birthday” and “sunshine,” from songs she was choosing herself on the Yoto.
Yoto prominently markets its music players as “screen-free” devices, even though each has a miniature display. The tiny screens can show simple pixelated art and typography, such as a birthday cake icon in reference to the Beatles’ “Birthday” track or a chapter number for an audiobook.
Mr. Drury said he called this feature a “pixel display,” because it was not a screen in the traditional sense that society had come to know one.
“Is it doing anything that’s in any way addictive or would require a kid to concentrate on that image?” he asked. “Could it display TikTok? Could it display YouTube? If the answer’s no, then it’s not a screen.”
