The most exciting thing about innovation is how much good it can do for the next generation. Our responsibility is to make sure that ambition actually reaches children: keeping them safe while we do it, and designing for their curiosity and development over simply capturing their attention. Get that balance right and technology becomes something that can genuinely enrich a childhood.
Ben Drury helped shape the first generation of digital music. Yoto came from questioning whether the same technology habits were right for children.
Ben Drury was building digital music businesses before streaming became ordinary.
He launched dotmusic.com in the 1990s, later co-founded 7digital and spent a decade helping turn digital music distribution into a mainstream business.
Then he became a parent.
Drury and co-founder Filip Denker were watching children enter a world of devices and apps increasingly designed around capturing attention. They wanted to know whether connected technology could offer something different: independence without an endless screen.
Yoto grew from that question.
Its players use physical cards to let children choose stories, music and other audio for themselves. The technology is still connected and digital, but the experience is designed around listening, choice and curiosity.
Drury did not reject the industry he came from.
He took two decades of experience inside it and asked a harder design question: if the user is a child, should the measures of a successful technology product be different?
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