Parental Advisory Stickers. We’ve all seen them. Those iconic little black and white stickers stamped on the cover of ‘explicit’ music, film and television. They were originally meant to inform parents of minors that the music they were purchasing for their children had ‘explicit content’ and was not suitable for children of all ages. Yet despite a warning label on a CD cover, teenaged consumers have made up the core audience for one of the most controversial and arguably most successful rap stars to emerge within the 21st century, Eminem, making one wonder what good the labels do in the first place.
On the other side of the world however, many believe they are still relevant and important. Now, the UK is taking steps to bring the parental advisory warnings to new medium – online music videos. In an age where YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, the UK government and the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) are set to introduce a new set of guidelines that will affect music in the UK.
Today YouTube, Napster, Spotify, and Vevo do not have a uniform parental guidance system although Apple’s iTunes does. The iTunes online store runs a warning system on its audio and video content. Yet following recent concern about the amount of risqué music content that is too easily available to children online the BPI is going to begin introducing parental warning logos before songs and music videos on those services that currently do not employ a parental guidance system.
Although not yet a standard in the US, it’s only a matter of time before a similar stance gets adopted in the states. However one has to wonder how playing a warning at the beginning of a video or a song is going to have any affect if there is not a responsible adult around to see it appear. After all, at some point those stickers on CDs became an indication of which records we wanted to buy – the one that had them.
References
Parental Warnings to be Introduced for Online Music
