[ktpsns]

Slightly off-topic: https://tonies.com/en-gb/ is a very popular physical music box for children coming from Germany. I guess (not sure) it pioneered figures with NFC chips which then let the wifi-connected speaker stream the music from their platform. Prices are crazy (like EUR30 for a 45min audio play) but wealthy middle class parents happily play it to avoid their children to control their streams from our sad addictive mobile screen world.

As an 1980s child I would love to see more (also cheaper) solutions coming up to make music physical again.

[bensyverson]

Also an 80s child, and can I ask: would you ever consider a CD player? We gave our daughter a CD player when she was 3, and it did the trick.

[ktpsns]

Yes definetly! CDs are still commercially available and really affordable as "hardware mixtapes". Heck, even my old car still has a CD player.

[gyulai]

I'll repeat a critique I've made about Tonies before [1]:

I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.

Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.

Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.

One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.

There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”

I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.

And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597664