I swear to god, more and more I keep having ‘clean’ versions play on Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer - despite the song being marked as ‘Explicit’.
And no, I definitely do not have the setting checked for only playing clean versions.
It’s not just me - is it?
I’ve noticed this using Spotify. If I manually play an explicit song - either directly or in an album or playlist - I get the uncensored version. If I ask Google Assistant to play the song, I get the censored version.
What im pissed about is that they used the censored version when they remastered this:
https://www.discogs.com/release/10057933-The-Doors-The-Doors
How much more censorship like this will happen in the future?
The worst example is the clean version of Ace hood’s bugatti, you got on an near game trial. Nearly every other word was absent. It was ridiculous.
I’ve only noticed this with one song in my Spotify library, Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”. I saved it years ago and near the end is a line “I’m the son of a bitch that named you Sue”. Out of nowhere about a year ago the album version changed to be “I’m the [bleep] that named you Sue”. It still shows the full lyrics, it’s just the audio that’s changed and it drives me up the wall.
That happens to a lot of songs with a a snippet of “socially” frowned upon lyrics. From a “Boy Named Sue to “My Dingaling” to When You Get a Hair Cut” to “Money for Nothin’”. Recording artists often have recorded 2 different versions of some songs - one for people to buy and one that can be played on the radio due to “decency laws” set by the FCC and local ordinances.
It’s been that way since the 1930s in the US.
I worked on exactly this for a while, a long, long time ago. It turns out to be an annoyingly difficult bag of problems. The record companies don’t really care, they sell (sold, I guess) pieces of plastic. (Idk if they fixed it yet, but the same Turbonegro album kept getting sent with the same scratches, kept getting taken down a while later, for years.) So, good luck trusting them to label anything.
Puritans are so much more aggressive than sane people that making mistakes one way is much more expensive than the other way.
Anyway, we ended up trying to work out which tracks are actually the same song, (Easy for you, harder for friend computer, yes?) and then if one of them is marked explicit, they all are, unless marked “radio edit” or “clean”, or whatever. If you think about this for a minute, if one track is labeled “radio edit”, maybe the other ones should be marked explicit…
It’s a deep rabbit hole, is what I’m saying.
And the people with the pitchforks are never happy.
I get that it’s not necessarily simple, however… Firstly, surely streaming companies could push for a standard formatting to make their lives easier. And second, why does a track that was previously explicit suddenly start playing as the clean version one day? Why is the data for it continually being changed?
Could ‘push’, yes, as in, “we mentioned it in passing when rock and roll grandpa wasn’t paying attention, so he wouldn’t throw a hissy fit and withdraw from the service”. Oh, you meant to the labels? Ha ha ha, NO. The labels have basically nuclear option veto powers.
As for changes, well, updates get delivered all the time, for various reasons. (The scratched Turbonegro album being one frequent flyer.) I think a lot of those are bullshit SEO-like reasons, but it is what it is.
Which artist appears in most frequent releases? I forget, but I think it’s Elvis. Possibly Johnny Cash. Why? Because some material has gone out of copyright in some jurisdictions, and so people have the idea to upload them again in ‘new’ compilations. (The content team don’t even beat these down personally – that’s machine work)