Yesterday was our little girls 3rd birthday. A fabulous occasion which everybody enjoyed thoroughly especially her. Some family members came round for present unwrapping and party food etc. It was all going nicely until i had a brain wave. “hey” i thought to myself “I’m on the XBOX 360 preview program, why don’t i take advantage of that by putting Last.fm on for some background music”.

This idea it appears was only great in theory, it appears my previous experience of Last.fm was no indicator of all of it’s content. I had only previously listened to things like Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden etc but was aware that more family friendly music was available. I switched my XBOX on, moved through the menu’s to Last.fm and selected a station appropriate to our daughters musical taste being Lady GaGa. The musical offering was as you can imagine, Lady GaGa, Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Pussycat Dolls and weirdly Heidi Montag. Pop music basically. Last.fm on your XBOX displays a slide show of photo’s of the artist while their song is playing, it appears at this point it should perhaps change it’s name to Lust.fm. The ensuing photostream of pictures could have been likened to softcore porn which is something i normally would not have complained about (other than the god awful sight above), but seeing as the music was mainstream pop listened to mainly by young people and the XBOX does try to market itself as a family console i thought it was pretty inappropriate.

Scared I’m sounding like an old fuddy duddy right now but i don’t think anyone would knowingly put the above picture and many like it on the telly knowing that their 3 year old was in the room. I am certain as well that there are far more “family friendly” pics of these artists available for use.

Update: I sent a link to my blog to Last.fm through twitter about this, they responded saying it was an issue they were working with Microsoft on. They also sent me this link to a post made by Major Nelson on his blog. It refers to the new features like Last.fm etc not being available to under 18′s right away as they are working on parental control’s for these features, this is of course is great news especially in light of the things i was saying about family orientation.

It would appear though that my issue would be unresolvable. My 3 year old does not have her own XBOX LIVE account where i can set parental controls to protect her from adult materials for obvious reasons, she’s 3. Therefore as with any other adult themed materials for the XBOX it would be up to me to not access those materials in front of my daughter, and that’s fine. I would never play any games in front of her that involved blood and gore or sexual themes, but the issue is that i was trying to listen to music, music which as far as i am aware does not require pictures of the artist in scantily clad attire or in some cases completely nude with limbs obscuring breasts. So my only answer is to not use a service I’d like to take advantage of, shame really.