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 organisers 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 US$768,000 ($1.4 million) in profit in 2024, declined to share more recent sales figures, but said it continued to be profitable.
Its success might 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 want from technology.
Nowadays, rather than empowering users, most tech companies, in their pursuit of growth and profit, are more focused on developing products that keep people glued to screens and hooked on apps so they will eventually look at ads or pay a subscription for companies’ services.
In the past 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, and 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 such as OpenAI and Anthropic have come into the crosshairs 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, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a non-profit that reviews products for families. “The parental fatigue, the overall fatigue from tech, is very real.”
The Yoto illustrates that tech companies can make a living with wholehearted intentions. The product, which began in 2017 as a crowdfunded project on Kickstarter, rose in popularity 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 US$80 and the slightly larger Yoto Player for US$110. But it makes most of its profit from sales of audio cards, which are sold through its website and stores such as Amazon and Target. They typically cost US$7 to US$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, which they upload to Yoto’s cloud.
Popular cards include tunes from the movie KPop Demon Hunters, Queen and the Beatles, a major feat for a company this small, considering that Steve Jobs and Apple struggled for many years to bring the Beatles’ catalogue 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 Jobs started a computer company in his garage.)
It certainly helped that one of Yoto’s investors was Paul McCartney, whom Drury met in 2019 through his connections in the music industry. The Yoto Player aligned with McCartney’s interests because the former Beatle had written several children’s books.
In the 1990s, Drury got his start in the audio industry 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 Denker on developing digital music apps for brands such as BlackBerry, Samsung and HTC.
Given their experience with music software, Drury and 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’ realisation that their infants loved cramming objects inside other objects, 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 colourfully labelled card was associated with different songs. This dad felt proud that his little girl’s favourite 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 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 or a chapter number for an audiobook.
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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Brian X. Chen
Photographs by: Sam Bush
© 2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
