SmartKidz Radio -- my REVIEW

We love to listen to music.  If you are in our house or car, you will usually hear music playing (except during schoolwork, usually!)  This is not something new--ever since the kids were little we've been listening to music.  We have standards which we uphold through our music--Christian themes and Biblical teachings.  I had the opportunity to check out a new online livestreaming radio station for kids called SmartKidz Radio in order to review it and share my thoughts with you.  It is produced by a company called SmartKidz Media.



When you read the "about us" section and the faq's you will read a stated goal through this radio station is "The Smart Kidz Radio Station is all about helping children learn valuable life skills and empowering them with positive self-esteem. The radio station also promotes the development of positive character traits and strong moral values."  

The station is a live stream, sort of like a regular radio station--you kind of join the livestream when you hit the play button, and when you push the pause button it turns it off for you, but if you then hit play again, it resumes not where you left off, but where the song has progressed to in the time that you paused it.  

The songs are of different themes -- character traits, family, siblings, being helpful, cleanliness, emotions, dealing with mistakes, manners, and more.  They are songs specially designed to be appropriate for young listeners.  

There are also "podcasts" which are stories to listen to--these are not live streaming, so if you pause the story you can return to the same spot to resume. At this time, most of these are fairy tales, with a few additional offerings.  The company plans to have an upgraded on-demand paid subscription which will potentially offer more of these and some other selections -- from their FAQ's, "Upgrade to On-Demand Programming. Members can upgrade their account which allows them to select from several radio programs on an on-demand basis (Upgrade requires a small monthly fee to access hundreds of songs and stories on-demand).

At this time, everything on their site is free.  You just have to sign up.  The paid programming option will be coming soon.

SO -- what did we think.  We did not care for the music.  Yes, my kids are older than the target age of these songs and the singing, but frankly, it is not our style, nor was it our style when our kids were younger.  I think the style is for a very young audience (3-6 maybe?) but others with older children may enjoy it, as I said before, it's just not our style :) 

My other HUGE concern comes from the website.  I am not familiar with this company, I have never used any of their products before, so what I see is how I can evaluate it.  In order to listen to the SmartKidz radio, one must sign up--well, when I read the Terms of Use (okay, I know most people don't read these, but maybe you ought to?) -- it is just LITTERED with misspellings and improper grammar and usage.  This really brought a red flag up in my mind. Several other pages on the site had misspellings as well.  In view of being careful online, that does not sit well with me. Once logged in, many of the links on the webpage for the livestream do not work (the ads for the SmartKidz bookstore -- all three of them) and the link for the "recently played" songs on the menu always is blank for me.  

I understand that this is a new offering by this company and hopefully many of these issues will be resolved, but as for me, I would not recommend using this site.  I will say, however, that many other reviewers really liked this site.  To get a more broad idea of how others liked SmartKidz Radio, please click on the link below: