Spotify is requiring users in the UK to verify they’re over 18 to view "certain age restricted content," and users are reporting seeing a popup on Spotify to verify their ages following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act last week, which forced platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children.
“You may be presented with an age check when you try to access certain age restricted content, like music videos tagged 18+,” Spotify says on an informational page about the checks. If you fail the checks, or if the age verification system can’t accurately determine your age—which involves getting your face scanned through your device’s camera to determine your age, or uploading your license or passport if that doesn’t work—your Spotify account will be deleted.
“You cannot use Spotify if you don’t meet the minimum age requirements for the market you’re in. If you cannot confirm you’re old enough to use Spotify, your account will be deactivated and eventually deleted,” Spotify says.
there is no fucking way. pic.twitter.com/o2L4tT8XAu
— bogus (@boogusangoos) July 29, 2025
Spotify is using a third-party system for age verification called Yoti. In 2023, when Utah started requiring age verification to access porn sites, porn site xHamster implemented Yoti, which involved a multi-step process including facial analysis or uploading a photo of a government-issued ID.
The Online Safety Act went into effect last week. Much like the many laws in U.S. states that keep users from accessing porn unless they upload an ID or pass biometric face scanning, the law requires sites operating in the UK to implement age verification or face millions of dollars in fines and jail—or up to 10 percent of global revenues, whichever is higher.
After publication of this story on Wednesday morning, a Spotify spokesperson emailed me to claim that the headline is not accurate.
"We are not forcing users to go through our age assurance checks, these are voluntary. There are multiple ways that users can go through our age assurance checks (e.g. ID verification) - not just ‘face scanning.' These checks are not in order to access explicit content, they are to access music videos that are labelled 18+," they wrote. All of this was already in the article as it first appeared when published Wednesday morning, cited directly from Spotify's own site.
"Will you please update your headline to reflect this?," the spokesperson said. "So to actually be accurate, your headline could read: 'Spotify is Offering Users Age Assurance Technology to Access Music Videos Labelled 18+'"
So far, the UK law has resulted in people having to verify their ages to visit subreddits that post news about war, certain Discord community, certain Bluesky content, and more. The UK’s Reform party is already vowing to repeal it, calling it “borderline dystopian.”
Also last week, 404 Media broke the news that in the process of collecting selfies to attempt to check users’ gender, women’s dating safety app Tea exposed the personal information, including private messages and IDs, of thousands of users. Critics of age verification laws say they only create more censorship for adults, while children and everyone else get around the checks by using VPNs or visiting less safe, noncompliant sites.
Updated 7/20/2025 at 12:32 p.m. EST with comment from Spotify, and to clarify in the first sentence that the verification is for "certain age restricted content."
